


If Eternal Winter, If Eternal Snow

by larklure



Series: A War of Ice and Ember [1]
Category: Check Please! (Webcomic)
Genre: Blood and Gore, M/M, Magic, Slow Burn, Some crying, Supernatural Elements, erroneous descriptions of swords and castles and armor, hopefully a pie or two idk how castle kitchens work yet, knights AU, losts of ice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-11-05
Updated: 2018-01-28
Packaged: 2019-01-29 15:40:25
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 25
Words: 64,020
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/12634098
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/larklure/pseuds/larklure
Summary: Eric Richard Bittle III is sent to the northern lands of Ice and Pines. In Samwell, a group of knights, the Candorines, train to kill the slanted, creatures of cursed or veiled origin. The Bittle family hope that Eric will be purified of an affliction they think the Candorines can remedy. A miscommunication occurs upon Eric's arrival, and rather than becoming subjected to Candorine purification, Eric is inducted as a member of their rank. There Eric struggles to fit in, and hide who (or what) he actually is.





	1. Upwards Into the Land of Ice and Pines

**Author's Note:**

> This is an experimental fic. I have no idea yet if I will finish it, but I hopefully will make more than one entry into the universe as I think it could be quite fun!
> 
>  Thank you for reading! Find more of me on my tumblr, [ Larklure ](http://larklure.tumblr.com/)
> 
> This epigraph is from Susanne Sundfor's "Turkish Delight"
> 
>  Edit: I am going to finish this come hell or high water. Also I have made a playlist for this fic from the epigraphs [ here ](https://open.spotify.com/user/elllott/playlist/50NAxwn2KF6ymDu2nysRUY)

__Well if eternal winter, if eternal snow  
I'll have a Turkish delight  
I've got the freeze, they offer me holy wine  
It gets me through the night

 

**⨁**

Eric Richard Bittle III watches the frozen countryside pass by from the stained glass window of his family’s carriage. Sunlight falls in blues and yellows across his lap, where his hands clench, desperately holding onto himself in hopes of containing the sobs that threaten continuously from within. If Eric begins to cry now, he will never stop. And he hadn’t, in the three long weeks of their journey, cried — or done much of anything. He sat, his back inhumanly straight on the unforgiving leather cushion, starring from the carriage door’s window with a detachment that seemed almost entirely surreal.

 

As a child he had never been the somber one in his family’s large and prosperous yield of children. Laughter had come quickly, a joy in Eric’s heart for life and the world that was whole-hearted and pure. It was not until the early years of his maturation that Eric learned how quickly that joy could be curbed, restricted and carefully contained, along with any other pleasure for living he might have once had. 

 

So Eric sat with his spine painfully upright, grimacing only as the carriage wheels came atop the occasional bump or rut. He had spoken with the driver that morning in the inn as the horses were readied for departure. They would arrive at the Bastide of Samwell by midday, maybe later if the weather that threatened to snow finally did. From there, Eric would be taken to the keep of the Candoris, where if his family’s luck prevailed, he would be put to death in a clean execution. Thinking of his head rolling across a featureless courtyard’s cobblestone made Eric’s stomach turn, the heat of his blood soar to an almost unbearable temperature, even if it was a welcome change from the unrelenting cold of the north. 

 

Never had Eric or any of the Bittle family journeyed so far into the northern lands. Up here, it was pine and ice and the wilds of uncultivated land that ruled, not the order of humankind. The forest people, relations of the people of the hills from Eric’s own home, were quick to move south for the winter. It was the time of slanted things to move about between the trees.

 

They came upon the bastide without fanfare. Wooden wheels coming atop cobblestone roads a mile out from the village center. As they passed into the heart of Samwell, the first large settlement Eric had seen for weeks, he took in the low slung houses of dark, almost black pine wood. There was a strong, unrefined beauty to the architecture of Samwell. The roofs capped with what seemed to be wooden tiles, shinned with ice or some varnish that Eric knew not what. Ice and snow was piled near houses and at the ends of streets and walkways as the carriage took Eric closer to his end point. For a liminal moment Eric considered what it would be like to grow up here as a child. No freer, he thought. At home, at least, he was only restrained by family, and not the unyielding banks of unmelted snow. 

 

The carriage pulled through the center of town, where stalls were being taken down, brightly colored canopy cloth rolled back and tucked away. The towns people were smiling and cheerful, those of paler complexion  red-faced from the cold. The driver stopped a moment to ask directions, and then it was another jerking start before Eric was taken down a thickly wooded road toward a series of stone towers in the distance. 

 

Slowly the horses pulled, passing collapsed walls of stone and outlying structures as they went. Dead ivy clung to the edifices, pulling apart the stones, and growing thick and lattice like even in their death. What would summer be like here, Eric kept himself from wondering. He didn’t have the room to hope that he would live long enough here to see if the snow ever fully retracted from the lawns. If the barren trees nestled between thick pines ever produced fruit. A single tear might have fallen then, when the smell of his family’s peach orchard was the strongest and most real even in his figmentary imagining. 

 

The sound of the wheels over uneven cobblestones called a few men out from the main building as the carriage slowed to a stop. A man with a thick mustache came forward, dressed warmly in leather and furs. The driver spoke quickly with the man before the door to the carriage was opened, and Eric was overcome by the rush of frigid air. 

 

“Welcome to the Candorine Keep,” the mustached man said loudly as he pulled Eric not impolitely from the leather seat. It was even colder outside in the unprotected air. Eric pulled his cloak about himself and tried to remember how to form words.

 

“I, yes. Thank you for the welcome, um-” Eric realised that he had no idea who the man before him was.

 

“Excuse my tongue,” the man cut Eric off thankfully before he could embarrass himself with a string of apologies. This also allowed him to notice how truly massive the man’s mustache was, as it seemed to bounce around his upper lip as he talked. “I go by Shitty, of the Knight family.” He laughed uproariously. “As unhelpful as that surname is in a keep full of knights.”

 

Eric laughed uncomfortably, secretly wondering if these introductions couldn’t be made inside instead. Or even, if his death were to be assured, if Shitty Knight would just take him and run him through with his sword right on the spot. A better alternative, Eric thought, to the icy wind. 

 

Shitty set about getting the other men to unload Eric’s meager luggage. Eric was in the middle of trying to understand Shitty’s increasingly incomprehensible, colloquial sentences when a hand came down on his shoulder from behind, startling him out of his own thoughts. 

 

He turned and came face to face with his own reflection staring back from the top of a dirtied chest plate. The dirty streaks across the dark metal seemed to be blood, though a foul smelling, thick and almost black blood if Eric was seeing it correctly. The man in the armor stood a good height above Eric, looking down from under a head of thick black hair, a grimace, and horribly blue eyes. Eric felt them pierce him from his head to his toes, a fresh finger of cold shooting down his spine. 

 

The man let loose a string of words, tersely spoken and in a language that Eric was unfamiliar with. They sounded heavy in vowel, looping over Eric’s head toward the three Candorines behind Eric. Shitty seemed unperturbed by the man’s sudden appearance, nor was he unsettled by the way the man seemed to be talking at him. One of the other yet unnamed men spoke back in the same language, though his voice was more sweet in the words, as though he had spoken with a softer tongue. They exchanged quick phrases before Shitty spoke up, in english. 

 

“Maybe you could ask the young man himself.”

 

Eric turned from Shitty, who he was quickly deciding to like most if he had to choose between the icy man and the others, to the second man.

 

In equally terse english the man spoke, “Who are you?”

 

Eric was surprised by the simplicity of the question. He’d assumed, maybe over confidently, that word of his arrival would have arrived prior to him. 

 

“I am Eric Richard Bittle the third of the house Bittle. My family sent me to the Candorine Keep at the Bastide of Samwell in hopes I be...” he couldn’t bring himself to say killed, or purified, or whatever else might be said to the riding of Eric of his life. 

 

His desperate silence carried on longer than he had intended or could end, and as he searched for the right turn of phrase the armored man nodded sharply and turned away from Eric entirely, dropping his gauntleted hand, which Eric had forgotten was on his shoulder. 

 

“Shitty give Eric a bed and show him where his belongings are to be kept. Ransom, take the carriage driver to the servant dwellings, and Holster take the horses.”

 

Eric could now fully smell the coppery, cloying scent of the blood that was plastered to the front of the man’s chestplate. The man stepped away from the group without another word, his armor clanking loudly as he ascended a short flight of steps, entering into the keep. 

 

It wasn’t until the heavy pine door shut behind the man that Eric realised he had forgotten to ask who  _ he _ was. He gave himself an allowance on the rudeness. For weeks Eric had been dreading the arrival to Samwell and its keep. It would either be death, or something far worse, he had been told as he’d been nonviolently forced into the carriage by his father. Lord Eric Bittle Senior had not been forthcoming with information, but the intention of the departure had been quite clear even to Eric. 

 

For the moment he would breathe easy, as long as he could before he was sure that he was in any clear or present danger. The keep, though surrounded by thick and snow-heavy pines, was clean on the outside. Though aged, it seemed in good repair. There were much worse places to be imprisoned, Eric knew. 

 

“This way, Eric Richard Bittle the Third,” Shitty said in his trumpeter's voice. It was implausible that he was able to speak like that at all times, but so far he hadn’t said a word that wasn’t mildly abrasive in volume. “That sure is a title, have you ever considered a nickname?”

 

Eric allowed himself to laugh, quickly following double Knight into the keep’s main entrance. 

 

“Would it be as… fecal in nature as yours?” He asked coyly. 

 

Shitty laughed as he did most things at this point, incredibly loud and freeing, and slapped Eric heartily on the back.  

 

“You’ll do well here, I can just tell.”

 

Eric wished desperately for that to be true. 


	2. Of a Forgotten Empire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric is given a room and a tour of the keep. Further mistaken intentions occur.

 

_ Blood returning to _

_ Cold cramped fingers, blue and pink  _

_ skin clinging to life. _

 

⨁

 

Eric was led into the largest great hall he had ever seen. From the outside, the main tower had appeared to be a simple and unadorned drum tower, one that Eric had assumed would house the majority of the knights and the servants. Instead, the drum tower was occupied almost entirely by the main hall, which stretched up several stories. Open air rose uninterrupted except for a single bridge spanning the third floor space, and then a stained glass ceiling above the entire atrium which opened rose-like from the center, pouring red and violet light down onto the stone below. 

 

Shitty walked forward through the space without pause, entirely unseeing of the way the sunlight fell through the roof and onto the curvature of the walls. It illuminated portraits and textile tapestries in the same red, patches of white slashed the fabric in great arcs. Eric was only prompted to move from the sight for fear of getting lost in the mess of hallways and corridors that lead off from the main hall. 

 

He didn’t stop himself from asking about the room, however.

 

“Oh yes, Faber hall is all that is left of the original structure built by the first of the Zimmermann clan,” Shitty offered offhandedly as he lead Eric up several flights of steps poorly lit by flickering torchlight. Every so often a window would mark the arrival at the next floor. Each was square-based with a pointed top, and offered only a sliver of the view outside the tower. 

 

“Most of the old castle was destroyed in a fire during the Great War several decades ago. Lord Robert and Lady Alicia Zimmermann did their best to rebuild, but they never quite finished.”

 

Eric puzzled this as he was lead away from the main hall’s circling stairs and down a passageway into another tower. It was clear, now that he knew to look for it, that this was a much younger section. The stone still sharp, not showing the signs of age at the corners. Every several feet were portraits or recesses where vases or artifacts of varying style sat. Some had notes marking their age, others were left entirely undocumented. 

 

“Who were the Zimmermanns?” Eric asked, eyeing a display of several antique swords, one of which seemed stained or scarred by some sort of black substance.

 

The gasped breath that Shitty released was loud enough to send reverberations down the corridor, haunting echoes of his screech bouncing back at lengthened delay. It startled Eric from his spot, jolting him back a pace or so. 

 

“Who are the  _ Zimmermanns?”  _ Shitty cried, turning wildly around to look at Eric, who wished suddenly that he had never mustered the courage to speak. The shock dropped quickly from Shitty’s face, replaced by a what might have been a humorous smirk that did little to settle Eric’s unease. “I jest, hah! The Zimmermanns used to live here when their family was in power. But the north has grown more wild, and they lost many of their family to the slanted. Now only a few remain. You’ve met their last son.”

 

Eric paused, feeling again the icey eyes against his body. He was afraid to ask another question, seeing how well the first had been received. 

 

“The man with the bloodied armor, and the… eyes?”

 

Shitty laughed, moving to continue along the passage and around a curved corner, revealing a long section populated by doors, with three of the pointed-peak windows at the end. 

 

“Yes, our very own chevalier, Jacques Laurent Zimmermann. But don’t let his status get to you, Jack is just as human as the rest of us,” Shitty leaned in conspiratorially. “At least we  _ think _ he is.”

 

Eric and Shitty jumped apart as one of the thick wooden doors flew open further down the hall, slamming resoundingly against polished stone. Three men who might have been near Eric’s age spilled out of the room. Like Shitty, they were dressed for the weather. Thick fur half-capes worn atop leather shirts, woolen tunics and trousers in the now familiar reds of the keep. Their conversation turned immediately upon seeing Shitty and Eric standing at the end of the hall.  

 

“So it wasn’t a  _ wailing one _ that we heard calling to us from the grave, it was just Shitty Knight!” one of the men (boys?) called cheerfully. He had thin brows and a wide mouth. The second boy with curled brown hair elbowed a third, who looked angry on top of his already fiery hair and complexion. 

 

“I told you it was just an echoing Shit taken to the wind,” the second said, garnering a look of disdain from the third boy. 

 

“Boys, this is Eric Richard Bittle the Third,” Shitty said, making a show of bowing toward Eric needlessly. The other boys laughed and offered an array of greetings. “Eric Richard Bittle the Third, this is Chowder, Nursey, and Dex. You will be bedding with them in the barracks here. Make sure he’s comfortable, and for the love of  _ God _ come up with a better name for this one.”

 

Unceremoniously Eric was steered into the room in question and pushed onto one of several straw mattresses that occupied the space. Then, as quickly as the introductions had been made, Eric was left with promises of gathering him for supper. Suddenly, Eric was again alone with his thoughts. He immediately regretted the solitude. 

 

He’d been under the impression that, upon his arrival, the leader of the Candorine Knights would assess his… ailment. Upon his departure his father had suggest, unkindly, that death was likely the only way to rid Eric of his disease. His mother had held him tightly, wet tears falling against blond hair.

 

But maybe the men here did not quite know why Eric had came. If that was the case, maybe he could feign obliviousness until it was impossible to otherwise. Unknowing of what might happen if they found out who and what he was it was best, Eric decided, to remain normal. 

 

The room around him proved some of his earliest worries. It was a barracks of sorts, the other boys’ gear and belongings piled in or atop chests. If he was correct they seemed to be knights-in-training, meaning that if he were to room with them, Eric himself was confused to be a knight-hopeful as well. 

 

Eric, who in his short life had never held anything larger than a kitchen knife, who had been prohibited from playing rough with the other boys for fear that he would harm them, or worse, destroy them utterly. Eric, who had brought almost no clothing, let alone anything else, under the impression that he would be killed at the moment of his arrival. Eric was to become a Candorine Knight.

 

It was clear, immediately and resoundingly, that Eric’s luck had a convoluted way of showing its support. 

 

“Eric Richard Bittle the Turd!” he heard Shitty holler from down the hall near an anxious and unsounded hour later. “It’s time for evening supper!”

 

With a last breath of preparation Eric stood and prepared to begin what might be the hardest, and final, performance of his life. 


	3. For A Brief Moment

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric begins to realize that this (whatever this is) will be harder than he at first imagined.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hey I took creative liberties with this chapter, I have to say. Once again can I just add that I've no idea what I'm doing? Updates might be spotty after this one, as I have college (and creative writing assignments for actual course work) to focus on. Thank you in advance for reading!
> 
> Epigraph from Agnes Obel's "It's Happening Again"

 

 __No future, no past  
No laws of time  
Can undo what is happening  
When I close my eyes  
And with the stars and the moon  
I woke up in the night  
  
In the same place  
To save me for my eyes

⨁

 

The next morning Eric pretended to be woken by the sound of the other boys gathering themselves for breakfast. In actuality, he’d gotten little sleep, and was wide-eyed well into the night. Wind against the still unfamiliar cobbled walls howled as it ran past, echoing (much like Shitty’s cry had the day prior) down the corridors and empty spaces.

 

When the other occupants of the room began to wake and light small candles to ready for the day, Eric rose and pretended in part to ready himself. Of the three boys with him, Dex seemed to be the most respectful in the morning, even as his earlier hospitality had been nearly frigid. He was quiet, careful not to disturb the other boys as he rose earlier than the rest, and silently slipped from the room toward the lavatory down the hall. 

 

Eric dressed quickly, bleary-eyed but conscious of the long day ahead of him made even longer by an unslept night. Supper the prior evening had been a simple affair, Shitty and Jack Zimmermann sitting toward the head of one of the dining hall’s long tables. Eric, the three boys whom he knew, and a handful of others around their age sat at a table off to the side. The two young men who had greeted Eric with Shitty sat at the other end from Jack, between them a young woman with hair cut below her chin, harsh and authoritative looking even as she just barely came to the shoulders of the men on either side. 

 

Conversation had been polite but stilted, Eric’s presence clearly unsettling the atmosphere of the table of boys. It was clear that they had been here for some time, if the familiarity between them was any sign. Their attitude toward Eric suggested that they didn’t receive many newcomers. In time the unease from the other boys settled enough that Eric was able to spend a few minutes simply listening to the gossip that was so common among would-be knights and boys: who had killed what, who had been injured and how, and where was the best part in the snowy woods for hunting. 

 

Chowder, a peculiar name for a peculiar boy, had asked after Eric’s lack of belongings sometime later, not quietly enough so that a few of the others heard as well. 

 

“I wasn’t told what I would encounter here.” Eric had replied truthfully. 

 

Chowder was concerned by this, but Nursey and Dex, pausing in what was proving to be a continuous debate between the two, offered their own advice. 

 

“You may speak with Lardo, the arms master here. She will get you, or make, all the things that you will need,” Nursey offered calmly. Dex nodded and had been about to offer something else when shouts from Shitty at the other table distracted the entire group. 

 

Now Eric wandered the bottom floor of the Keep in search of where this Lardo might be. He’d almost looked down every one of the numerous branching halls when the distant sound of metallic clangs resonated through the floor. Eric followed them until he found a well-lit stairway leading down a short ways into the earth. The chill seemed to gather in strength as he descended, the smell of dirt and polished steel accenting the descent. 

 

Eric rounded a corner to find the young woman working away at a sword atop an anvil. Eric stepped further into the large, thankfully warmer room. The sword that Lardo, he assumed, worked away on was bent and horrible disarrayed. Eric breathed a sigh of surprise and wonder. Why they would even attempt to repair it, he had no idea. 

 

“Advice for the uninitiated,” a cold but not entirely rude voice said from the side of Eric. He turned, and unsurprisingly, found that it was Jack Zimmermann who had spoken. He stepped further from between racks of miscellaneous armor and weapon things, nebulous piles that needed a thorough sweep of an organizing hand. 

 

“Keep care of your things,” Lardo finished for Jack, who after a moment of silence nodded in agreement, and then left, traveling back the way Eric had come. 

 

“He put his sword where it didn’t belong, and now look at it,” she continued once he’d gone. “I’m still not sure what he expects to get back. It won’t be the same as it was before.”

 

“Is it ever?” Eric asked in reply.

 

Lardo did not say anything but turned back to her work. The steel of the blade was incredibly red, looking more like hot cane sugar candy Eric’s grandmother used to make than any type of metal. After a time, and much hammer pounding, Lardo took a break. She stepped back from her forge and beckoned for Eric to follow her through the stacks of things. 

 

“Shits suggested that you might be...lacking in the sword department,” Lardo said coyly as she plucked various tat from the shelves and pushed them into Eric’s arms. “These will do until we know what your style and needs demand.”

 

She paused in front of racks of swords, some longer than Eric was tall (not saying much, he thought bitterly). Others were wickedly curved, and some, like the one that Lardo had been repairing, were simple arming swords with two cutting edges. The kind that Eric’s father had used, on occasion, when there was trouble in the surrounding settlements. 

 

“You’ll know right away which sword won’t work for you when you pick it up,” Lardo explained, though she made no move to offer one of the countless weapons to Eric. “That will wait, however, until Jack has a go at you. I won’t have an untrained boy with a blade running around my keep.” 

 

Eric smiled, and felt almost appreciative at the opportunity to avoid a weapon for as long as possible. Something about the way his blood sang when it saw the reflection of light of the cold steel made his nerves quake. There was a fire in his blood, one that his family had tried well to cool. Maybe it would take Jack, and his eyes of ice, to finally extinguish. 

 

Part of Eric worried that Jack and the Candorine training would do the opposite, and he would burst into flames, the kind that would never go out. 

 

Lardo shook Eric from his thoughts by dropping a leather cap onto his head, and throwing at him a thick, worn woolen set of pants. His arms ached under the pile of things, but he said nothing as Lardo led him toward a desk in the rear, where she promised a quick death if he lost any of the things she wrote down in his possession. 

 

“There is nothing more awful,” she said helpfully as Eric stumbled away. “Than when an arms master is told her equipment has somehow been lost in a lake or moat or field somewhere.” 

 

Eric wondered who the culprit of that story might have been. Shitty, more likely than not. 

 

“I suppose coming back with a mangled sword is better than no sword at all?” Eric asked, trying to speak over the pile in his arms. 

 

“Only just, Bittle. Only just.”

 

⨁

 

The layers of clothing proved all but useless against the tearing wind that roared across the prairie that stretched out behind the keep. Grass, what stalks were not crushed under the weight of snow, whipped violently in the wind, and around a small frozen lake cattails bounced, stark brown against the snow. It was highly distracting.  As Eric could barely feel anything but his own heartbeat because of the cold, it was a highly welcome distraction. 

 

Eric stood near Chowder, the two of them watching quietly as Dex and Nursey sparred away with wooden blades. They used no form Eric had ever seen from his father’s knights, nor did they seem to swing wildly in the way young and unpracticed squires might. Dex took strong, ravaging swings at Nursey, who rebuffed them with ease, calmly stepping out of the other’s range before returning to jab at his soft and exposed stomach. It was not dance-like, that would suggest a sort of rhythm which was entirely vacant from the display, but it brought what little breath Eric had in his chest out at the sight of the wooden blades narrowly missing thinly padded flesh.

 

Without any other direction, Eric asked if Chowder would like to spar as well. The boy smiled sheepishly but agreed, handing over an extremely abused wooden length of wood that might have once been a mockery of a sword blade. Chowder was gentle, but it was quickly obvious that Eric had neither the strength nor the skill to match Chowder’s wide and consistent swings. Despite his best efforts, Eric was pushed back until he was almost falling into the banks of snow that had been shoveled back from the rear of the keep to make room for a sparring field. 

 

Chowder stepped forward, swinging his wooden blade out to rap Eric on the shoulder when he crumpled suddenly. He was at once overcome by the dread of the supposed strike, and the fear that the blow might unleash the phantom flames which leaped inside Eric at the very suggestion of combat. Bile rose suddenly in his throat and he tried desperately not to cry out in terror at himself. 

 

Chowder’s confused shouts of mixed surprise and fear brought the attention of the others, and suddenly Jack was pulling Eric up by the collar of his leather shirt. 

 

“I hardly even came close to tapping him…” Chowder said breathily, but the rest was lost to Eric in the sudden increase of wind, and the thunderous look on Jack’s face. 

 

“What are you  _ doing? _ ” he asked viciously, his mouth a red wound against impossibly pale skin. “This may be sparring, but it is  _ no _ game.”

 

Eric was speechless for a moment until the hand Jack had clasped to his front gave him a hard shake. 

 

“I am sorry, I am sorry! I didn’t mean to fall, I slipped on the ice,” the lie was flat but Eric knew was also hard to argue. The ground was only snow crushed underfoot, and it slipped against the leather boots that Eric wore.

 

Jack dropped his hold on the front of Eric’s shirt, but his eyes remained piercing and unkind. Behind them the sound of wooden blade against blade had fallen silent. Jack left as he had came, with long strides. 

 

“Again!” Jack shouted to the group at large, and the clatter started up with a flourish of pine blades. Eric stood, shocked out of himself. He took two, slow breaths before he turned again to Chowder, and vomited onto the ground. 


	4. When the Minutes and Hours Have All but Added Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric begins to realize (once again) how serious life with the Candorines is. Jack seems to have something in mind for our would-be knight.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you for all those who are reading this, I appreciate the support in whatever way it comes! 
> 
> I hope you are enjoying yourselves as much as I am writing this, It is definitely not something I saw myself doing a week ago. 
> 
> Epigraph from the lovely Lia Ices' "Ice Wine"

__These fruits that we have grown have froze  
Heavy on the vine  
Winter brew is born from the temporal and rime  
The thicket and the thistle cry new kind of wild  
Drink up to new dead and new alive

 

⨁

 

A week passed as such. Eric barely held himself together during the daylight hours, and collapsed bonelessly onto his lumpy straw bed at night. Training began with the sunrise and lasted until even Jack was sore and tired. Lunch and supper with the boys in the hall became a thing of dread for Eric. He would have just as soon made his own meals and eaten in a back chamber than sit elbow to elbow between Chowder, Dex, and Nursey. At least there he didn’t have to feel the looks of pity or worry that came often when they thought he could not see. Or worse, the searching gaze that Jack turned on him when the other men at his table were occupied. 

 

Once, when Jack had passed by to speak with a boy at Eric’s table he had leaned down, and said in flat, accented english, “You should eat more meat.”

 

It was in clear reference to Eric’s plate, which admittedly had been light, as for the past several days only venison steak was served, something that Eric’s family to the south rarely ate in favor of bird or fish if other red meat wasn’t available. In anger, Eric had loaded his plate with boiled potatoes and then sugared raspberry preserve, eating the later without bread, spooning it into his mouth in spite of the tart sharpness. He caught the eye of Jack later that evening, and took no small amount of pride when he wasn’t the first to look away. 

 

He regretted that the next morning when he lay face up in the snow, having crumpled yet again under the oncoming blow of a partner (unfortunately for Ransom, one of the young men from the first day, who had been assigned as his opponent). Jack took Eric in hand, as he’d done the first time, and shouted into his face without regard for how closely the two stood. 

 

“Do you think this is funny?” 

 

He was almost red-faced in his anger, something that was truly remarkable. If Eric had been in any other position, he might have had the space of mind to think the color on Jack’s cheeks was a marked improvement. “This is no game,  _ Bittle _ . Either you take this seriously, you leave, or you die. There is no amnesty given by those we fight.”

 

For the first time Eric wondered why Jack took his lack of skill as such a personal offense. His anger was quick to rise, and bitter in the way anger often is from men who feel shamed. Maybe Eric’s disposition for collapsing was an unforgivable sign of weakness in Jack’s eyes. Or if not, maybe Jack felt Eric’s own inability could impact the other knights in some way. The embers of whatever lingered within Eric called out, supporting Jack’s sentiment. They wished eagerly to be released, to fight for survival. Eric knew, from the first and last time the flames had been allowed to bloom, that opening them again unto himself was not an option. His father still had the burns to prove that, after all. 

  
  


⨁

 

Distracted by his own worries, Eric failed to notice the patrols that circled round the keep and through the pine forests surrounding the Bastide of Samwell. It would not be until well into the third week of his time with the Candorines that he truly paid close attention. On the holy day, and at odd hours during the remainder of the week, Jack and several older boys set out into the woods. They might be gone for hours at a time, and it was impossible to tell if they would all come back. 

 

The first time Eric was aware of the patrols, he realized in retrospect, was his first day in Samwell. Jack must have just arrived back to the keep, intercepting Eric’s arrival on his way in to remove his armor and get warm. It both explained the blood that had coated Jack’s chest plate, and the fact that Shitty, Ransom, and Holster (as he had learned in the intervening weeks) had been near the main door when Eric had arrived. 

 

Eric began to notice their departures with increasing worry as they left most often at times that seemed the most needlessly dangerous. Jack led every excursion, save a very slim few which happened during the daylight hours, when the weather was clear and bright. 

 

It seemed as though the patrols happened frequently during days of horrible weather, or late into the night and early into the morning. They were gone for most of the days surrounding the full moon. Then when a blizzard blew in from the northwest, Jack disappeared with his ensemble for almost two days. It made no sense that Eric hadn’t noticed sooner, but for as much as he thought about Jack, it was more dread than anything else. Dreaded things were hard to miss, even easier to celebrate their absence. 

 

This changed after the third day of the blizzard, which had snowed so thickly the makeshift sparring field was covered in at least a span of snow, if not more. Unable to practice in the outdoors, Jack had sent the boys to manage their gear, assisting Lardo (who quickly turned them out) in organizing the forge and store holds. 

 

That next morning Eric was woke by a gentle but firm hand well before the first light of the sun rose. He jolted upright, panic quickening the breath in his chest, when he realised that it was Jack who woke him. Not entirely placated by the fact that the other man stood over him, he sat forward. 

 

“Jack?” Eric asked quietly so as not to disturb the other boys. In a bed across the room Dex shifted.  His eyes opened long enough to see Jack in the room before he quickly turned over and feigned sleep. 

 

“Gather your clothes and dress warm. See Lardo down in the store room when you are ready,” Jack said. His face was hard but not quite as unkind as it had been in the last several weeks. If Eric wouldn’t have felt foolish thinking so, Jack seemed almost hesitant to be waking Eric. “Bittle, we go into the forest in fifteen minutes, don’t be late.”

 

Without any other orders Jack left Eric, who in the wake of his presence stood at the end of his mattress staring into the open air above him. What exactly could be going on? It wasn’t like Eric was going with Jack on a patrol, he could hardly hold a pine sword and slash at another boy without dreading real collision, let alone wield a true blade. 

 

Nevertheless Eric dressed in his thickest pants and another pair under, for fear of the cold that leached the very heat from his continence. Dressed and unsure, Eric entered Lardo’s domain on quiet leather-booted feet. Around the corner the short woman was working away on a small chest plate. It was the same dark metal that seemed to compose most of the armor pieces worn by the knights. 

 

“Lardo, I was sent by Jack. Is there something you wanted from me?”

 

Lardo laughed and stood. She held the chest plate at arms length, judging it alongside Eric’s torso. 

 

“More accurately, I think there are a few things you’ll be wanting from me” she replied, putting the plate in Eric’s arms before turning to walk down the narrow walkway which led to the racks of weapons at the back wall. “Though I think it’s an utterly stupid idea, I cannot argue with Jack.”

 

Eric followed, too confused to really understand what Lardo meant by that. The chest plate was heavy and cold in his yet ungloved hands. Rather dazedly he followed Lardo at a few paces, dreading what he began to realize was coming next. 

 

“Pick one,” Lardo said motioning to the wall of arms behind her. “I’ll help, of course, but you know more of your own taste than I.”

 

The chest plate almost fell from Eric’s hands as his worries were confirmed. 

 

“What? I don’t even know how to swing a wooden blade to any real effect,” he cried in disbelief. Fire laughed mockingly from within, but it was also eager to feel the weight of polished steel in hand.  Even as Eric took a panicked breath, the other part within began to judge the arms before him. 

 

“Jack made it clear you were to be given a weapon and armor for going into the forest, I know nothing more than that,” Lardo replied. 

 

Of the countless swords, axes, and polearms before Eric, his eyes were caught on a somehow familiar blade, shorter than most but with an oddly large crossguard for its length. The baselard was attractive if only because it was a size Eric might actual be able to utilize without inadvertently taking his own limb. 

 

Without any way to argue, he pointed to the sword of choice. Lardo, who had watched with a quiet and critical eye, nodded in agreement. 

 

“Funny that you’d choose that baselard of all else available,” she offered, plucking it from the rack with ease. “It’s a fine blade. Blue, layered steel. It is all that is left from the sword you saw Jack bring back.”

 

Eric opened his mouth in such a wide circle he most likely looked like a floundering cape fish. 

 

“I in no way meant to pick Jack’s sword. Um. Give me a few moments and I am sure there is another that I can pick that will do the job,” a gross feeling quite like the aura of vomiting came to Eric, the steel sword looked nothing like it had when it was horribly mangled, red hot and billowing heat. “Let’s see I—”

 

Lardo cut Eric off with a thrust of the sword into a scabbard, a thick leather belt hanging from it in a simple woven style. 

 

“Too late, this is the one you’ve chosen, and jack won’t mind. You said yourself nothing is ever the same as it was before. Your baselard, as it is now, surely is not the same as the sword Jack once owned.”

 

Eric reluctantly accepted the offered sword, attempting to quiet his racing heart and tempestuous nerves by wrapping the belt around his narrow hips. 

 

“I don’t know what to say.”

 

The chest plate was taken from Eric’s hands, and Lardo began to loosen the straps along the back corners. 

 

“I don’t think you need to say anything, just pay attention while I explain how to put this on.”


	5. Howl

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric learns that snow is not the only thing that moves between the pines at night.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> What are we going to do with these boys. 
> 
>  
> 
> As always my epigraphs continue to be cliche, this time borrowed from the timeless Florence and the Machine's "Howl".

 

 __A man who's pure of heart  
And says his prayers by night  
May still become a wolf  
When the autumn moon is bright

 

⨁

 

Snow crunched underfoot as Jack led Eric alone into the closely standing pines. The blizzard still howled, pouring down thick clumps of snow onto the trees through small gaps in the foliage. Eric could see little but what was directly in front of him, phantom limbs poked trunkless from the semi-dark. There was little light, and so Eric had to follow behind Jack close. Often the other’s hilt cracked against Eric’s hip as they walked. 

 

Jack had said almost nothing when Eric entered Faber hall. He had simply pulled his own thick wool scarf around his face before leveraging the thick pine door open, allowing a slump of snow and a wild swirling gust to rush in. Though Eric had no true sense of what was happening, he followed Jack without question. Maybe it was foolishness that spurred him on, but in honesty Eric was curious. He only hoped satisfaction was enough to protect him from whatever was outside the walls of the keep. 

 

“Where are we going?” Eric finally asked after what must have been a half hour later, his patience worn thin by the cold. Their tracks through the snow under pine branches were more lasting than if they had walked the open prairie, but they were not forever and Eric feared losing any sense of the way back. 

 

“There is no destination,” Jack said unhelpfully, his voice muffled by the thick scarf, heavier in accent than normal possibly because of the early hour. “We are simply walking through the forest until one of them comes.”

 

Eric stumbled on a branch that had fallen and was obscured in the dense snow. 

 

“One of who?” He was beyond feeling dumb because of his limited knowledge. He claimed no real understanding for whatever was out in these woods, and felt confident in that. Anyone could gossip of the slanted, but few really saw them. 

 

“Today, maybe there will be  _ black dogs _ . They hunt most often in the early hours and during snow storms when visibility for their prey is low.”

 

A terrific caress of cold ran up Eric’s nerves, drawing the heat from his bones and sparking the already frozen tips of his fingers. He’d heard the boys jest at each other, sometimes mocking howls at one another in the lavatory, or when they ran down to the great hall to break fast. 

 

“You actually want to encounter one?” Eric asked, somehow unsurprised by this even if the fact terrified him. It made sense when he thought about the reason the Candorines even existed at all. They were hunters at their core, and Jack who Eric had seen covered in thick black blood, was the best of them. 

 

“One way or another you need to see how serious this life is,” Jack said shortly.

 

For an agonizing hour Eric followed after Jack through the gradually lightening forest. They changed direction at times, which appeared to be for no reason, though Eric was sure Jack knew exactly where they were. Infrequently bodiless sound would echo from further in the shrouded trees, but never once during their hour did Eric see anything but falling snow move through the branches. 

 

Close to a quarter hour later Eric was exhausted from the tension that held his back upright. He ached desperately to be warm again, and even the fire in his core was chastised by the cold to mere embers of sensation. 

 

“This is enough” he said finally, fearing real loss of his toes. Simply walking did not keep the blood flowing to them. Despite the cold he feet had sweated, and the now damp socks could do nothing to stop the bitter ground from leaching his heat for itself. 

 

Jack turned and was about to reply when something shifted behind him. Eric froze in fear, seeing only a length of snow overweight a tree limb and spill soundlessly onto the ground. Jack turned at what must have been Eric’s noticeable suspension of movement. He gave the trees a critical gaze before once again turning to Eric. 

 

“Bittle, I know the cold is only as bad as—” 

 

A flash of dark rushed from the side, hurling itself bodily against Eric and Jack. Eric crashed headfirst to the ground, his leather cap and cloak hood filling with snow as the layered bank collapsed under his weight. The sound of struggling brought him immediately back to his feet, disoriented and near panic.  

 

The creature was atop Jack in the snow, its giant muzzle lunging at the man with a wide mouth of stark yellow teeth. Thick saliva fell to the ground, copper tinged and foul smelling even from Eric’s distance. Jack held the maw back with the metal bracer on his arm, shoved under the chin of the creature, angling it back as best he could. It became a losing fight as the creature bore down from above, pressing all its massive weight downward. 

 

Without panic, Jack kicked out at the back leg of the creature, attempting to unbalance it as it leered forward on top of him. The bracer slipped and the creature took Jack’s arm in its mouth, biting down with a vicious alternating shake of its head to the left and right.

 

Bile rose in Eric’s mouth but fire was quicker, sparking down the entirety of his body, expanding out as though it had replaced his nerves with its own. Eric drew his blade without hesitation, the blue steel dark against the snow. With a weighted step, Eric brought the cutting edge down upon the exposed heel of the creature.  

 

A sickening gorging sound followed as the blade embedded in the weak ankle. The bone caught the blade and for a moment both Eric and the creature screamed, one in pain and the other in panic as the sword lodged and was stuck in the hind leg. 

 

From beneath the creature Jack kicked at the injured leg, toppling the massive furred body over on its side. He jumped back, favoring his now exposed arm. Thick tendrils of blood poured down it, leaving a dark coppery trail in the snow. Unbalanced and injured, Jack tried to pull his sword from the sheath, unable to get the right angle as his dominant hand seemed almost useless under the blood. Eric gulped a fortifying breath before darting around the creature, pulling the sword from Jack’s side without question. 

 

“Thank you, Bittle,” he gasped, his voice strong but wavering with pain at the end. Jack took the sword hilt from Eric’s gloved hand, and with his left arm swung out at the animal as it rose, catching it atop the snout and striking a wound from one side of its mouth to the other. It howl in pain, a cry that was startling humanlike. Eric looked for something to pick up and swing at the shape, his blade nearly freed but still attached to the hind leg of the creature.

 

Seeing it from the front made Eric realize why few often spoke of what the  _ black dogs _ actually looked like. It was as though he was seeing a reflection of something in murky water, the medium too unclear to garner any real sight of the subject. The  _ dog _ was darkly furred from head to hind, with a maw of long yellow canines and curved hind legs. It was larger, however, than any dog or wolf Eric had ever seen, and its face was somehow wrong looking. Too short to be truly wolf-like, and it was under set a pair of human eyes with a sickeningly wide pupils that obscured almost all color of the iris. 

 

The creature surprised Eric, reaching back with its foreleg and pulling from itself the sword with a half-formed pawhand. It tossed the blade to the side, crying out in what might have been anger. 

 

“ _ Bittle!”  _ Jack shouted suddenly as the  _ dog _ leaped forward. 

 

Eric did not think. Suddenly he was moved as if by another mind entirely. He fell to the side, crashing thuddingly to the ground. He caught a fallen pine limb and hoisted it out of the snow, striking the creature across the injured face. The pain stunned it, sending a spray of brackish blood in an arc across the snow. Eric threw the pine limb at it and dived for his blade in the white bank. 

 

The sound of animal desperation was loud in his ears, and frighteningly impossible to know if it came from Eric himself or the  _ black dog _ that bore down on him from behind. His hand came upon the heavyweight of his sword in the snow, and without pause he turned. 

 

The creature slammed into Eric’s chest with tremendous force, knocking the wind from him and sending him down again into the snow for the countless time. The sword was stuck somewhere between the two, the thick pommel a blunt and charging pain against Eric’s gut. 

 

Hot wet stench poured from the chest of the thing, drenching Eric’s belly as it dripped down the length of his exposed sword. 

 

“Jack!” Eric cried, the rush of fire in his veins leaving him suddenly as the creature, mirroring what it had done to Jack, lunged against the blade in its gut and snapped down at Eric’s prone form. 

 

A pair of awful, thudding strokes came from above, and a thick squelching echoed before the head of the creature fell beside Eric’s in the snow. Jack reached down with his injured arm, crying out in pain as he hauled Eric from under the slumping body of the  _ dog _ . Black blood spurted out of the severed neck, the unclean wound, no doubt mangled by Jack’s inferior left hand, was a fleshy and terrible sight.

 

They stood in the wake of their fight, panting heavily. Eric dropped boneless to the ground, his legs losing all strength as tendrils of shock wormed away at his mind. 

 

“Bittle-” Jack managed before collapsing, bloodied and unconscious in the snow. 

 

Eric looked over at the larger, armor-laden man, and then at the dead form which slowly released steam from it’s opened neck, a sword wedged deep in its underbelly. 

 

“Fuck me.”


	6. Falling, Catching

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A morning after, of sorts.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Title for this chapter is from Agnes Obel's "Falling, Catching". I am currently assembling a playlist for this fic, let me know if you guys would like a link to it!
> 
> Again, thank you all for your time as you read this!

⨁

 

Holster and Shitty found Eric halfway between where the  _ dog  _ lay dead, and the outskirts of the bastide. He was drenched in sweat that was his, and blood that was not. Jack lay behind Eric, dragged poorly on a makeshift sled hewn from torn shreds of their cloaks and pine branches. Atop his chest sat both swords blackened with blood. The smaller one was black from tip to pommel and sticky with undigested food. Eric was upright for another few steps, relief uttered to Shitty in a delirious string of words before he fell, succumbing at last to the elements. 

 

⨁

 

When Eric woke next, only the weighted heat on him confirmed that he was conscious. He shifted and a heavy down comforter that was not his own shifted atop him, falling back from where it had been pulled to his neck. 

 

“Bitty, you’re awake!”

 

Shitty was suddenly everywhere, as though the blanket and the mattress itself was just Knight in surprise. Eric reeled back when he felt Shitty’s apparent nakedness brush against his leg under the covers. 

 

“Ah! What are you—Shitty?!” Eric hollered weakly. He meant to move away but was suddenly hit by the magnitude of his exhaustion. His fingers and toes throbbed angrily and his limbs felt wooden and hollowed out. 

 

“Lay down. You can relax your sensibilities, I only disrobed to better warm you, little Bittle the Turd.” 

 

Shitty scooted away a blessed half foot, bring Eric’s attention to the ludicrous size of the bed he was in. 

 

“Where am I?” Eric asked, ignoring Shitty’s leering smile at his unclever play of words. Then, as if struck by a bolt of lightning, Eric sat upright. 

 

“Where is Jack! Is Jack okay?”

 

He had to be physically restrained from jumping out of bed while Shitty hollered for someone to come. Dex and Nursey poured in from where they they had no doubt been listening, their ears still pressed to the cracks in the old timber. 

 

“Jack is in bed resting under Ransom’s orders,” Dex offered helpfully, reddening with staunch embarrassment across his wide cheeks and at the tips of his large ears. 

 

Nursey pushed him to the side lightly, stepping further into the room, “Chowder has been hovering over Jack for the past day or so. I think Jack is thankful for the quiet when he sends Chowder down to the kitchens for a fresh pitcher of water. He seems to be drinking much more than is humanly possible.”

 

Eric, not set to ease by this, made to move against Shitty’s arms holding him to the thick sheets. 

 

“I’ve been in bed for a  _ day _ ?” Eric elbowed Shitty and managed to get his upper body exhumed from the thick comforter. He realised rather late that, like Shitty, he was entirely naked. He slumped back in defeat, pressing a hand to Shitty’s face. While at arm’s length with lips slightly crushed, Shitty spoke quickly. 

 

“The both of you were almost dead from the cold. It was best for us to get you in bed and warmed up, and get bandages on Jack’s arm.” Shitty’s mustache was hot and rough against Eric’s palm. He dropped his hand, turning to look up at the ceiling. “I promise you that bastard has been through worse wearing less armor than we found him in. He’ll be fine, Bitty.”

 

Eric turned over, feeling exhaustion that he wasn’t entirely sure came from his near-death experience alone. 

 

“Jack’s a bastard?” he asked, mildly surprised. Then as an afterthought, “What did you call me?”

 

“Ah it’s more a turn of phrase, that man is definitely a product of the Zimmermanns, both of them.” Shitty said. “And I called you  _ Bitty _ , Bitty. On account of how itty you are.”

 

Dex and Nursey chuckled at this. Shitty seemed pleased with himself too, if the way his mustache bounced as he smiled was any indication. 

 

“Get out, all of you,” Eric sighed, pulling the covers over his head. 

 

Dex and Nursey left without much complaint, their relieved laughter following them into the hall. After a moment Eric pulled back the covers, revealing Shitty nestled up with his head atop Eric’s chest under the comforter. 

 

“You too.”

 

“But—”

 

“Out!”

 

⨁

 

The wood of the northern pines grew black with age, the oldest lengths of timber that the Bittle’s had bought for their manor house long ago (those that hadn’t gone to rot on the inside) were a dark brown that was near black in color. The pine wood that made Jack’s door must have been incredibly older. The age set upon it from within, turning black with an incredible luster that owed nothing to varnish. 

 

Eric stood outside Jack’s door for what might have been a handful of minutes. He wasn’t counting. In fact he’d spent the time wavering between knocking confidently and walking away as quietly as he could. He turned in another circle, dreading either choice with each passing moment. Neither was really desirable, but once again curiosity and satisfaction played a game of bets (both of whom seemed to be playing against Eric). 

 

“Chowder go away!” Jack’s tired voice called from behind the thick door. Eric paused in his worrying steps.

 

“It’s Bittle,” he called back. 

 

A pause followed in which Eric wondered if he hadn’t spoken loud enough. 

 

“Come in.”

 

Eric pushed heavily against the door which opened on oiled hinges, with a slowness due more to its weight. Inside the room was sparsely furnished for a state room. The walls were barren, inhabited only by pointed windows that opened the room outward to the prairie which fell off to the west of the keep. As Eric walked carefully into the room he could see the setting sun play off loose snow that waved in patterns across the frozen lake in the distance. 

 

Jack was sitting upright in a wide bed of a northern style, with a high wooden back and carved images too poorly lit to be seen from a distance. A duvet of deep blue swallowed Jack’s legs, leaving only his broad unclothed chest exposed. Eric’s stomach settled heavily in mixed sadness and relief at seeing Jack’s right hand, five-fingered and wrapped at the forearm, snug against his chest with a wrap of white cloth. 

 

“I came by to give you my apologies, and to see how you are,” Eric said. He was unsure of where to stand in the room, whether or not he should have remained near the door. A chair, most likely for Ransom to sit while he waited for Jack to wake, was pushed up to the side of the bed. The torch light and flickering illumination from the fireplace cast a soft glow on the room. Eric felt his intrusion with acute precision. 

 

Confusion flashed visibly across Jack’s face as he appraised Eric with a focused gaze. His eyes traced down the length of Eric’s form, making Eric catalogue self-consciously what he’d thrown on after climbing out of his own recovery bed. A simple tunic belted over trousers, ones that had been given by his father so as to not give away the Bittle family wealth. 

 

“Bittle, euh–Eric,” Jack seemed to be in pain and at an even greater loss for words. Eric took pity on him and turned back to look out the window. In the many hours while they had slept the blizzard cleared, leaving behind an incredibly blue sky, and a landscape of white cotton. Everything was weighted down, even the cattails had fallen under the press of snow and wind. 

 

“ _ Bittle _ ,” Jack continued with passion. “If there is anyone who should be giving their apologies, it is me. I put you in that danger needlessly, when you weren’t ready.”

 

“You saved my life.” 

 

Jack was pale in the face when Eric turned. Maybe it was not because of their conversation but his near run-in with death. He tried to push from his mind how miserable Jack looked when his cheeks were whiter than snow, and how it made Eric ache. Problematic thoughts, surely, ones that Eric would push from his mind the moment he left this room. 

 

“I was the one who put it in danger in the first place,” Jack said. “I don’t thank people often, as often as I probably should. So, thank you, Bittle.”

 

Eric took this with dignity as was polite, though he felt in no way worthy of it. Whatever had happened between them and the  _ dog _ was violently unexpected, something that Jack should have been prepared for, but for whatever reason having Eric there had put them both in danger.

 

A great pressure came upon Eric then, building from above and around and within. He longed suddenly to crawl back onto the thickly bedded mattress in his own space and pull the sheets over himself. Eric turned to the door, feeling that if he stayed in Jack’s sad and empty room any longer he would burst forth into tears with no simple answer for why. 

 

Jack’s voice stopped him as he crossed the room. 

 

“Bittle, I would like you to stay.”

 

Eric turned, confused and unknowing of what Jack meant. Should he go and sit by him in the chair near the bedside table with its unopened books? He didn’t think he would be able to last longer than a few minutes there. 

 

“I would like you to stay here at the keep,” Jack clarified. “I think you could be a capable knight if you were to be trained, if you get over whatever is stopping you.” 

 

It was like a spike had fallen from Jack’s words, nailing Eric where he stood. His blood was animated by fire at the idea of Eric swinging a weapon forth unflinchingly, a knight in part or full. The image of limbs being cleaved apart horrified Eric, and yet it was the sight of Jack trapped beneath the larger body that lingered the longest. If being a knight under Jack meant helping those in positions of direness, perhaps it was something that was worth the risk of Eric’s...whatever it was being unleashed. Perhaps even Jack could help Eric with that too, in time. 

 

Maybe a useless thought, but the only thing that Eric could really see as his future, he’d already been turned out of his own home. 

 

“I will help, as best I can,” Jack broke into Eric’s thoughts, thinking he was refusing the offer with his silence. 

 

“I accept your offer, Jack Zimmermann.” Relief fell across Jack like a cloud’s shadow granting needed relief from the sun. He fell back against the dark wood headboard, his strong chest returned with some color. 

 

At the door Eric allowed himself to turn and look once at Jack, who motioned with his left hand. The door shut as it had opened, on silent hinges, and softly Eric stepped over uneven stone tiles in search of the door to his own quarters.  


	7. The Flute Plays

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things begin to change, as they do in the north, slowly and by degrees.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Alternative titles to this fic include "Icy-Hot: icy to dull the pain, hot to relax it away" or "idk how writing actually works."
> 
> Epigraph and chapter title from the awesome folk song "Kaval Sviri (The Flute Plays)".

_A kaval is playing, mother,_

_Up-down, mother, up-down, mother._

_Kaval is playing, mother,_

_Up-down, mother, outside the village._

_I'll go there, mother, to see it,_

_To see it, mother, to hear it._

_If it is played by a fellow villager_

_I'll love him from dawn to noon._

_If it is played by a foreigner_

_I'll love him for my entire life._

  
  
  


 

⨁

 

Jack was relegated to his bedchamber for a week of rest under threat of punishment (which, Eric assumed, involved a naked Shitty). Ransom, who was the only one among the keep who knew human physiology on more than a cursory level, was more lenient to Eric. He was allowed to move back into the chamber with the other boys after a night spent in the down bed. The straw mattress was far inferior to the other, but Eric found a comfort in being in the company of the boys. Something about being able to hear them breathe settled his nervous mind. It was there, awake while Chowder snored softly, that Eric allowed himself the freedom to feel happy at being alive. 

 

A fragile tranquility lasted the brief duration of Jack’s rest. The minutiae of day to day life became easier to withstand, in part, because Jack’s absence from training allowed Eric the freedom to feel afraid, to flinch back from blows and to fall back upon the now familiar habit of skirting away from sparring whenever he could. 

 

When Eric was woken before daylight a week and a half after the occurrence in the woods, he was gripped by a moment of near insurmountable panic, as though he were waking again to go into the pines to his likely death. He gasped against the muscles which squeezed like a vice against his ribs, desperate for air. Jack’s face again came into view above him, as it had the morning before, this time though ushering an edge of the panic away when he spoke. 

 

“Bittle, it’s Jack,” he said, moving his hand from Eric’s shoulder where it had been. “I’ve just come to get you for our training.”

 

Eric rose once his breathing settled, dressed, and followed a still-bandaged Jack down the flight of stairs toward the rear door of the main keep. They stepped out the back and found fresh snow where the training field had been. Wordlessly Jack walked back a few steps from the door, reaching into an alcove just off the main walkway. He returned with an age-worn shovel, and handed it over to Eric. Eric looked out at the wide field. 

 

“I only need to clear enough for me, right?” Eric asked, hoping to jest his way out of what he fear would be an hour of hard labor in the cold. 

 

“Sorry, Bittle” was all Jack said, smiling with the corner of his mouth and lifting his bandaged arm. 

 

⨁

 

Eric admonished himself for ever getting out of bed when, after training alone with Jack until the sun had risen, he was tasked to complete training with the other boys as well. He’d underestimated Jack’s intentions when he’d offer to help Eric improve. Eric had assumed the special attention might occur during the normal training hours. Jack, who seemed to work harder than any human could, woke Eric up for utter hell after hell.

 

“Something you have seen for yourself Bittle, but you may not realize, is that the creatures in the wilds to not fight with chivalry,” Jack had said once the snow was cleared away by Eric and a few torches were placed to light the open space. “They don’t fight for honor nor do they care about form or finesse.”

 

He was accenting his words with solid raps from his pine blade, held softly in the left hand, against Eric’s own. Eric tried not to flinch back as he met each strike unwillingly. Jack’s pose was strong, and with each strike he stepped forward, pushing Eric back to the snowbanks.

 

“The slanted fight to survive, and so must you.”

 

Eric had to stop himself from mentioning that he and the slanted might have more in common than simply fighting to live. Was it fear of being shamed, Eric wondered as he tried to bolster himself against Jack’s strikes, unsuccessfully. Or, more aptly, was his hesitation to tell the truth,  _ as much as he knew of it _ , a result of the very real reality that Jack might be bound by his own sense of honor to kill Eric. Where was the line drawn between Eric’s humanity and whatever the fire was inside him?

 

Eric didn’t know any of the answers to those questions, and so he simply made do with what he could. The fire sang with wicked satisfaction when Jack’s blade caught Eric’s arm, drawing a sharp sting of pain. It longed for combat, and Eric had to restrain himself and it. He feared what might happen if he struck out the way it wanted him to. 

 

“There is something holding you back,” Jack said later into their training. He had Eric practicing dodging his strikes, something Eric did with marked proficiency, used to avoiding things. “We are going to get you past whatever block has you.”

 

“How long are we going to keep doing this?” Eric asked, out of breath and uncertain if he could continue for much longer. 

 

“Until you stop holding back,” Jack said, and then looked up toward where the sun’s first rays were rising from the other side of the keep’s tall towers. “Actually, the boys will be waking soon for their training, so we have until then.”

 

⨁

 

Winter solstice came upon the keep faster than Eric expected, the short daylight hours making time in the north seem to flow unexpectedly. Mornings blurred together, occupied by Jack more often than not. Jack joined the others in patrols once he could again use his right arm, and suddenly almost two thirds a month had passed. 

The midwinter celebration was never one of the December holidays the Bittles or any of their neighboring families had celebrated. So when Jack gave the knights (and knights-in-training) three days of uninterrupted rest and the keep descended into a riotous spree of revelry, Eric was taken entirely by surprise.

 

“I went into Samwell proper this morning and invited all that would come. This Midwinter will be the grandest festival this keep has ever seen!” Shitty shouted from the main door to the boys and keep servants who were lounging about in the large open space of Faber hall. There was little work to be done by those who were not preparing food for the festival, and so most of the stablemen, Lardo, and most of the household servants were free to join the boys in leisure. 

 

Shitty, who Eric now knew was quick to laugh and quicker to undress, was in no way lying in saying he’d invited all that would come. 

 

The first night of the solstice, Samwellians poured down the main cobblestone road with torches and cheers of merriment, hefting food stuffs and gifts for their family at the keep. The main hall was full to bursting with revelers, people spilling out into Faber, and the rooms connected beyond. 

 

This was the moment, Eric decided, when he could finally explore the keep’s massive kitchen without being noticed. He snuck in during a rather loud moment when Ransom and Holster had rolled another barrel of wine from some cellar hidden away. The cheering from the hall had been deafening, but also loud enough that Eric was able to slip back into the kitchen unseen. 

 

The kitchen was beautiful in the way Eric thought most were. Huge walls of fired clay bricks made up the four outer walls, the far side of which had ovens with the telltale wisps of smoke residue peaking out opened mouths in the brick wall. Tables ran the entire length of the space, covered in knives and spoons, detritus of food scraps and used dishes from the festival were still left about. 

 

It took Eric a handful of minutes to clear a space near the oven, find and clean the needed tools, and assemble all the ingredients together for a simple and quite small apple pie. The kitchen, while large, suffered in the way Eric wondered if most winter kitchens in the north also suffered. There was little fresh fruit of the kind he would have liked to bake with, and only preserves of the kind that Eric liked even less for his pastries. 

 

After an hour or so of fretful checking, as the oven’s were of a different design than that of the southern style of the Bittle kitchens, Eric took the small pie out and set it aside to rest and cool. He waited with anticipation, hoping that none of the staff or knights might come in looking for something. Once the pie was settled well enough, Eric bundled it on a carved wood plate and snuck out the way he’d came, hidden under a roaring from the halls. 

 

Eric found his way to Jack’s door with some trouble, forgetting how the keep seemed to swallow hallways and replace wide corridors in the night and when one looked away from where they were going. He continued, though, because he wanted greatly to gift Jack with his first pie ever made in the keep, a thank you of sorts for the time Jack dedicated to Eric, even if Eric wished he would let himself (and Eric) relax a bit more. Finally finding the door again, Eric knocked quietly before it opened revealing Jack in a plain tunic, clearly rumpled from rest.

 

“Oh, I didn’t mean to disrupt you!” Eric said at the same time as Jack asked, “Here to share someone else’s stolen hard work?” 

 

Jack seemed to be smiling, softly, in a way that he did few other things. 

 

“If you can steal what you make yourself, then I must be a thief,” Eric replied proudly and with more ease than he knew he could muster. 

 

“You made that?” Jack asked, eyeing the small pie with open curiosity. He suddenly jolted upright, opening the door wider for Eric to step into his chamber as though realizing that Eric was stood there in the hall waiting. The thick curtains had been closed, the light of an almost full moon exchanged for a tall fire that burned away in the hearth. A large stack of books, more than Eric had seen in a long time, sat atop a desk Eric hadn’t noticed the first time he’d visited. Jack seemed uncomfortable, unsure of where to stand in his own space. Eric understood entirely what that felt like. 

 

“Yes, my family are known for our prowess in the kitchen,” Eric replied, nervously, attempting to push the plate into Jack’s hands before realising that he’d stupidly forgotten Jack’s newly healed injury. He blushed sharply, no doubt impossibly red in the low light, and turned to put the pie down on the desk. Jack was giving off a warm, nervous energy that seemed entirely too soft for the man that Eric thought he knew. It was disarming in a way that was dangerous for Eric’s composure. 

 

“I never knew that, nor really anything of the Bittles. Your family do not seem to come so far into the north” Jack replied softly. It was as much an acknowledgment of Eric’s baking as it was a question as to why Eric was here in the north. Eric forgot, sometimes, that contrary to his first belief, Jack and the others seemed to have no idea why he had come to them. 

 

“What are you doing in here. Don’t you want to be down with the others celebrating?"

 

Jack didn’t seem perturbed by the sudden change in subject. He shook his head minutely before looking away to the closed curtains. 

 

“No, I tend not to enjoy myself with the dense crowds that Shitty and the others gather together. I much prefer the quiet, it is easier for me to think that way.”

 

While Eric understood as best he could, he felt a somber sort of longing for Jack. It must be terribly lonesome at times to sit in the half-dark with only books and parchment paper for company.

 

“Maybe next solstice you’ll join us for a little while,” he offered.

 

Jack chuckled dryly at this. “One thing you will quickly learn, Bittle, is that Shitty, Lardo, and the others will find any reason to crack into the wine cellar.”

 

A thunderous round of cheers echoed the long way from the halls to Jack’s room, marking his point. 

 

“Solstice or not, you needn’t wait long for Shitty to find some way to wake up entirely unclothed in the bottom of an empty wine barrel he and Lardo likely emptied themselves.”

 

Eric laughed at this, and after a few more moments of contemplative silence he wish Jack goodnight and snuck back down to the rest of the partiers. 

 

In the morning when Eric woke to a note tacked to the door thanking him for a ‘surprisingly excellent, likely unhealthy pastry-thing’, Eric smiled ear to ear. If Jack found out the note was tucked under Eric’s pillow for safe keeping, well, it had somehow gotten there by mistake. 


	8. Meditation In An Emergency

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things continue to go bump in the night. Eric and the Candorines begin to fear something yet unnamed in the woods.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Sorry for the long wait for this update (in comparison to the ones prior), my computer adapter may or may not have tried to light itself on fire and I had to replace it. 
> 
> I also am at that point where I have no idea where I am going or what I am doing with the narrative, so we'll see how the updates go moving forward. Enjoy this rather short chapter, hopefully I will have more over the next day or so.

⨁

 

Shitty, Holster, and Ransom came back one night after patrol just before Eric was going to turn in, a sense of stern gravity exuding from all their faces. The look that Shitty wore unnerved him, shocking in the way that it seemed to leech the life from his face unnaturally.

 

“Bitty, get Jack,” he said while Ransom and Holster spoke in hushed tones near the main door. 

 

Eric took pride in making it to Jack’s room without a single moment of hesitation, the corridors aligning in a way that he could make sense of after a month and some days spent in the keep. Several solid hits to the door yielded no response from within. He frowned, trying to decide if he should enter anyways. The urgency implicit in Shitty’s tone overrode Eric’s proclivity for courtesy. The door opened, revealing an empty room with only a candle burning low. The desk was also barren, the stack of books that had been there were gone. 

 

He thought for a moment, and realized where Jack might be. The library had never been a place Eric had needed, only because he had little time between training, and the duties he had been given by Jack to assist Lardo. He was the only of the boys Lardo let into the store rooms for longer than a half minute, and so it made sense that he would be assigned to help. 

 

It was unsurprising, then, when it took Eric nearly ten minutes to find the library, tucked away at the top of one of the rear towers, overlooking the prairie and the lake to the west. Inside the double doors, the area was lit by candle light and a blazing hearth behind a perforated metal grate, keeping stray embers and ash from spilling out onto the rich carpet. 

 

Where the bookshelves did not sit were tall, unadorned window panes. Unlike others in the keep, these windows were large and rectangular, mimicking the shape of the shelves of books. Eric wandered for a bit through the stacks, the smell of parchment almost overwhelming him in the close space of the aisles. 

 

He found Jack in a small alcove toward the rear of the library. It was softly lit by a suspended brazier, a half ring of cushioned divans of a style unfamiliar to Eric sat across from two tables, one of which was occupied by a tall stack of selected books. The other occupied by Jack, who seemed entirely enthralled in what might have been a collection of maps or an almanac. 

 

“Jack?” Eric called, not wanting to disturb him but realizing rather tardily that he had been gone for near fifteen minutes and that the others were waiting. “Shitty wants to speak with you, it seemed important.”

 

Jack looked up immediately at his voice, and before hearing news of Shitty, gave Eric one of the careful smiles he had been turning over more and more frequently. It fell when he heard of Shitty, and suddenly Eric had to run to keep pace with Jack’s far longer stride ushering them back to the main hall. 

 

“What did he say? Something must have happened,” Jack said, walking too quickly for Eric to really reply without half-shouting. 

 

“He only said to fetch you.”

 

Jack’s rising anxiety spilled over to Eric, making a roiling, uneasy feeling sink low in his gut. Nothing good came of nerves, yet there was something deeply unsettling about the way the other three knights had looked upon their return. Eric allowed a bit of his fire to spark from inside, if he couldn’t be entirely confident of what was to come, maybe he could borrow a bit of the other’s inside him. 

 

Faber hall was poorly lit by the time Jack arrived with Eric close at his heels. Long pillars of shadow stretched up the cobbled walls, only meager illumination from an almost full moon giving a tint of color through the stained glass ceiling floors above. 

 

Shitty was impatiently pacing, the other two elsewhere or sitting unseen until Jack arrived. 

 

“Oh thank god—Jack!” Shitty immediately ushered Jack down the north-facing hallway which led under the side of the main stairs. Behind a few doors they came upon a war room of sorts. Eric could see, even from the door where he stopped, a large map spread out across an equally massive circular table. Atop it were small wood and stone totems that seemed swallowed by the stretched parchment. Ransom and Holster were already in the room, as was Lardo. She looked tired, dressed thickly in an oversized course knitwork tunic. 

 

“Shitty tell me everything,” Jack said, moving to stand where his shadow cast by one of several torches did not obscure the map’s image. Eric went to retreat out the door, feeling unease at the seniority of the gathering when Jack called to him. “Bittle, shut the door and come take a seat.”

 

Eric did as he was told, unsure of what exactly to expect when he did. His hands shook minutely as he pushed the thick pine doors closed, shutting out the colder air of the corridor. Shitty looked over at him worriedly. He opened his mouth as if to speak out in argument but closed it as Holster shifted forward to speak.

 

“We were east of the bastide by maybe five miles or so, a close distance but not so close that the farmsteads have any neighbors nearby,” Holster said. His face was dominated by thick, almost comically large glass lenses with wired frames. He nudged them further up his nose from where they were drooping as he spoke. “Ransom said he smelled something, like the fire smoke when you burn wet brush or debris, but it was too dark out there for us to really see where it was coming from.”

 

Ransom nodded, his face grave but not uncharacteristic in the way Shitty’s had been. 

 

“We came upon the household about fifteen minutes later, I’d guess” Shitty continued for Holster. He twirled the edges of his mustache worryingly, making one side a curled point while the other still spread rough and wild from the cold wind. “Or what was left, it had been burned to the ground sometime earlier. There were no active flames, but the coals were still warm to the touch.”

 

Jack was enrapt in this, looking between the three men and the map in front of him. While Holster and Shitty had spoke, Jack moved a few wood pieces just to the right of Samwell on the map. The area seemed to be signified by a massive clearing in the dense woods that surrounded the bastide, open area enough for several dispersed farmlands.

 

“I found the first body by stepping on it, it was too dark even with torchlight to make it out against the rest of the coals,” Ransom said simply. He looked grey in the face, the color leaving his normally rich skin. “They had been burned, and possibly dismembered prior to it. We only found three bodies, though there was much of the household that was too collapsed for us to investigate.”

 

“And the cause?” Jack asked, a question Eric thought too difficult to answer. The three of them couldn’t have been there that long, not long enough to figure out the source of the fire in such intense dark and cold. 

 

In spite of Eric’s doubt Holster nodded once, lifting from inside a small leather pouch a corroded metal crossbow bolt, the tip blackened by flame. 

 

“We found a fourth body near where little of the house remained but piles of ash and coal. It had this wedged between its ribs, the entirety of its body burned.”

 

The bolt was passed around the table to those who had not seen it yet. Lardo gave it a close inspection, sniffing the pockmarked end before passing it to Jack, who gave it a simple examination. 

 

“What does it mean, finding one of these?” Eric asked when the bolt was passed to him. It was far denser than he had imagined, the end with the damage seemed to be eaten away at, as though it was bread left out to be taken to by hungry town birds. 

 

“The bolt is pure iron, though I’d say it was spelled to at one point or another,” Lardo replied, still eyeing it in Eric’s hand. 

 

“We use them on occasion to hunt some of the more resilient slanted ones,” Jack said, taking a careful seat at the table. He was closer to Eric’s side now than when he had been standing, his arm hot against Eric’s in the cool space. He had to remind himself that Jack was simply sitting for comfort, not for the closeness to Eric that this new position provided. 

 

“The  _ Wailing Ones _ and the  _ Pine Walkers _ are burned by iron, though from the destruction of the house that they described, it would have had to be something else, older or more powerful,” Jack considered outloud. “Few creatures react to an iron bolt in the chest by bursting into flame.”

 

Dread rose hot and quick in Eric’s chest at the idea of the creature, hit by one of the family in self-defense, opening an inferno upon their house as it died. More terrifying, perhaps, was the reality that the creature could be just like Eric. He pondered that, rubbing the edge of the thought in his mind like a worry stone. What would happen if Eric were to be hit by a bolt like this? It fell from his slack fingers percussively, startling him as it rattle across the table.

 

Jack was looking at him critically but not unkindly in the way he might have done a month prior. Lardo and Shitty were talking closely, and the other two simply waited where they sat. After a long few minutes of tense silence, during which it was clear that Jack was frantically pondering away behind his weary frown, he rose and dismissed the group. 

 

“It is late, go back to your beds and get some rest. Lardo, I will speak with you in the morning,” Jack said, tucking the iron bolt into the leather pouch. 

 

As Eric stood to leave Jack took his arm in hand and steered him to the side while the others padded on quiet feet down the stone corridor.

 

“I trust that you will be smart with this knowledge, Bittle, but I have to be sure you know that none of this can be told to the other boys.”

 

Eric nodded. He felt the point somewhat self-evident. This was terrifying to Eric, who knew very little about what could have caused this. No point, really, in telling the other boys. 

 

“Why did you let me stay in the room?” he asked in reply, taking charge of himself to step back from where he and Jack were stood closely together in the empty room. Jack was looking down on him in a way that was entirely indiscernible for Eric. 

 

“It is better for your curiosity to be sated now, than for you to fetch me and then be sent away–only for you to linger around later because you were unsatisfied with the unknowing.”

 

It was a smart observation, Eric thought, from Jack on how he operated. There was no doubt that Eric was worried before hearing of what the three had found, and Eric had no real clue what he’d have done if he was sent back to bed without the knowledge he now had. 

 

“Thank you, for the forethought,” Eric offered, stepping away even further to begin his journey back out to Faber hall and up to the barrack chamber. He felt a stab of self-doubt and remorse before he said, “I hope that whatever it was that was out there, it truly died with the family it killed.”

 

Jack didn’t say anything to this at first, his face once again turned down to Eric’s.

 

“As do I, Bittle.” He said this softly. “As do I.”


	9. Mother, Its Cold Here

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric Richard Bittle III is outed when an unexpected guest arrives to the bastide of Samwell. Murmurings are beginning, and somehow jam is involved.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Your guesses are as good as mine where this is going. I took some artistic liberties with baking in this section, as firstly I think Eric could use it, and secondly what really was there in the form of good baked goods in the medieval period?
> 
>  
> 
> Epigraph from Brandon Flower's "Only The Young"

 

Mother, it's cold here  
Father, thy will be done  
Thunder and lightning are crashing down  
They got me on the run  
Direct me to the sun

⨁

 

A horseman arrived early the following morning, carrying banners stylized with the embattled border and arboreal sigil of the Bittle house. Eric was one of the first to see the horseman, having woken several hours prior to train with Jack. A wave of unexpected warmth had risen from the south during the night, ushering a thick fog in atop the low-lying landscape and through the densely gathered trees. The sound of horse hooves over cobblestone echoed thickly in the clouded air, alerting the two while in a pause amidst their sparing. Together they walked curiously round the short side of the keep.

 

When Eric saw the banner, his stomach nearly plunged through the earth. He had understood, obviously incorrectly, that once he left the south he would not receive any communication from his family. He was exiled, in a way, until he was cured of the ailment that afflicted him, or he died trying.

 

The bannerman dismounted, disheveled from the ride and clearly worn weary by the cold. Much could be said of southerners disdain for the north and its oppressive chill. To his credit, this rider seemed to at least be dressed as befit the weather. He pulled back a thick hood, revealing a lesser knights in the service of Eric’s father.

 

“Who are you?” Jack asked cautiously. The three were stood across from one another, he and Eric unarmed save for dulled metal short swords which he had recently begun to use in Eric’s training. The other had a long sword tucked away in a decorative hilt.

 

“Greetings, my greatest pleasure to see you again, Lord Eric,” the faintly familiar man said first, making a short bow to him before addressing Jack. “I am Harper Forrow, I come to announce the arrival of her Ladyship Suzanne Bittle of the Southern Pride to the Candorine Keep and its charge, Chevalier Jacques Laurent Zimmermann.”

 

The air seemed to chill by sudden degrees as Jack straightened, his face grown suddenly expressionless. Eric felt as though his chest were about to burst open, or worse, his feet root him to the spot and he would never again move. There was no reason why, he thought, that his mother would make the long journey north in the middle of winter. Not unless something had happened back home. Dread and worry were familiar to Eric, but no more welcome than before.

 

“I am he. When are we to expect her ladyship’s arrival?” Jack asked, and though it was polite Eric could hear the confusion and anger that made his voice thick with accent.

 

“By tomorrow evening at the latest,” the bannerman replied.

 

Jack nodded and dismissed him simply.  “You may bring your horse to the stables, I will have someone fetch a room for you to stay while you rest from your journey. Welcome to the Candorine Keep.”

 

Jack waited for the man to lead his horse to where the stables peaked out of the dwindling fog before he turned on Eric with the full intensity of his gaze. He said nothing at first, only looking at Eric as though with new eyes.

 

“I should not be surprised, should I?” he began. “That the Bittle clan is so closely related to the royal family of the southern lands?”

 

Eric didn’t know how to reply, and intimately felt as though he was going to burst into flames in the most shameful way possible. He was curbed by the way Jack looked at him with marked disappointment, and something else, maybe, that was harder to read. The Phelps family had long held firm standings with the north, keeping strong borders open only to minimal trade and cultural intermingling between the two nations. Eric had once been told as a child by his older cousins that the people of the north were odd, wild people who longed for the ice of winter and fled in fear of summer sunlight.

 

“Why didn’t you tell me of this?” Jack asked. “Did you know your mother would be here to _visit_?”

 

“I chose not to tell you because it was, and continues to be, more complicated than I could voice,” Eric said simply, though he wished with no small amount of remorse that he could tell Jack everything. But the fear of Jack’s reaction was still far stronger than the hatred Eric had for himself for betraying Jack’s trust. “And no, her visit is as much a surprise to me as it is to you.”

 

Jack nodded once and, as coldly as a dismissal as he had ever shown, stuck his dulled blade in the snow at Eric’s feet and walked toward the keep’s main door. Eric watched, feeling the beginning of an anxious surge rise up in him. He turned once, looking down the long road through the slowly clearing air. Whatever his mother came for, he felt it would not bode well for the keep and its occupants.

 

⨁

  


Weight of his mother’s impending arrival and the shadowy danger that now lurked even more menacingly in the wilds surrounding Samwell finally broke Eric. Without remorse he stepped into the kitchen amid the bakers, cooks, and other servants now getting ready for the unexpected arrival of his mother. A woman came up to him, meaning to turn him away, thinking perhaps that he was simply a hungry boy in search of a between-meals snack.

 

“Give me a table and a set of bowls, I will make the best damn bread any of you have ever tasted” Eric said with no small amount of aggression. It had been months since he had spent real time in the kitchen for more than a few stolen hours, and though Eric’s muscles had begun to strength under Jack’s careful watch, there was a certain rigor to bread making that his finger’s missed.

 

The woman gave him a cursory once-over before shrugging. “If you mess up, it’ll be Jack who can knock some sense into you,” she said, leading the way into the kitchen.

 

Rye bread, though thought of among the households Eric had once spent much time with, as poor people’s only culinary achievement, was simple to make and hearty. Eric set about making a batch in a trough, mixing in ale-barm and kneading with his hands. He felt his stress flow from him as the aroma of the kitchen seeped into his skin. The smell of the ovens cooking slowly toward the back, with the clatter and scrape of cut vegetables, large pots boiling away.

 

The first loaf came out of the oven slightly lumpy, more so than is normal for rye. The woman who had helped Eric before gave it a stern onceover, but allowed Eric to continue when she took a taste of it after it had cooled enough to eat. She smiled knowingly, winking at Eric in approval. The first was always the least successful, Eric knew. None of these people had any idea what they were in for.

 

Soon the smell of Eric’s rye bread began to pervade the area near the oven mouths, those who worked nearby were taking pieces from the earlier loafs still marked here and there by Eric’s unfamiliarity with the northern oven design. Eric was almost able to convince himself that everything was fine. He was wrist deep in another batch of dough, this one barley, and if it hadn’t been for the odd accents of these northern workers he might as well have been hidden away in the kitchen of his home.

  
  


⨁

 

Lady Suzanne Bittle arrived that night just before dinner, much earlier than Eric had hoped. He was still working away in the Kitchens when a sudden silence fell over the busy room. He did not notice at first, moving to take the final loafs of bread out of the oven. Then a kindly commanding voice called to him from a few feet behind.

 

“Aren’t you going to come over here and greet your mother after she’s just spent weeks in a carriage to visit you?”

 

Eric turned, finding his mother, showing no outward sign of exhaustion, standing tall for her short stature amid the servants in the keep’s kitchen. He was speechless at first. It was one thing to know that she would soon be here, and another to actually stand before her after believing that he would never be able to speak with her again.

 

“Mama,” he said, letting himself be pulled into her frighteningly firm grasp. Her tears kept to her eyes as she gripped him close to her chest. She pulled back only kiss him on both cheeks like she’d done once, then pulling even further back to look at him as though she’d noticed a stain on his clothes.

 

“Why, Dicky, these _northerners_ sure know how to fatten up a young man,” she said. A few of the cooks overheard what they thought to be a compliment and smiled. “I could not have imagined my little boy with any more muscle than a scarecrow.”

 

Eric immediately went a violent shade of pink, embarrassed in part by the unladylike way his mother was doting on him as though he were a flowery young one.

 

“But baking is no task for you, come with me and show me my room,” she said, ushering Eric quickly from the kitchens.

 

In the corridor a servant in Bittle colors was waiting to escort Suzanne to her room. They led up the winding stair, the entire time Suzanne took in the view of the keep. At times her distaste was clear in the purse of her lips, though she said only the most flattering things as they walked.

 

The room came upon them quickly. The servant gave a short curtsey, saying she would be back in a quarter hour to collect them for supper. When she left, Suzanne took three long strides toward the bed and layed down heavily. Eric waited near the door for her to speak, knowingly he wouldn’t need to wait long.

 

“I haven’t the slightest idea what it is you are doing here, cooking for them in their kitchens, but I can assure you it was not the intent when your father sent you here,” Suzanne started, sounding as chastising as Eric had ever heard her. He recoiled, feeling at once the threat her words provided. “But I have to say, your father has always managed to be a fool in one way or another. I am thoroughly glad this is one of those occurrences.”

 

She sat up then, her eyes watery again as she looked toward her son.

 

“I don’t know what I’ve done with you” she said, her voice choked by tears that fell slowly down her aging cheeks.

 

Eric felt cruel asking, but he was burning away inside with dread and the unknowing of it, “What are you doing here, Mama? Has something happened?”

 

Suzanne laughed at this bitterly, shaking her head so that a few strands of her slowly greying blond hair escaped from underneath her warm headdress. It seemed at first that she would not answer before she stood, stepping forward to take one of Eric’s hands in hers.

 

“For now all you need know is nothing has happened, except maybe that your mother has become overpowered by her regret and weakness.”

 

She wore the look that often accompanied conversation with Eric’s aunt, one of the many Phelps.  It was also said with an unnerving tone, one that was so often involved with someone being sickened by ‘poorly’ preserved jam.

 

“But you could have simply sent a letter” Eric said, exasperated by the lengths that she had gone to know if he was alive, and annoyed at length that while she had come all this way to see him, she still danced around the deeper happenings in the family.  

 

“There are certain things that should be done in person, Dicky,” She replied. “You of all people should have learned that from me by now.”

 

A knock sounded at the door before Eric could reply to this, signaling that it was time for the two to head down for supper.

 

“Come, let us go down and break bread with these northerners” she said as she tucked her stray hair back under the deep blue cloth, and as Eric had seen her do many times before she returned to her form the personage of a stern and powerful lady. It was as though the aged Suzanne that had just been was suddenly folded away, revealing the lady of a powerful house who stood before him. “I want to see the look on that handsome chevalier’s face when he takes a bite of that bread of yours.”


	10. Is This What You Want?

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Suzanne proves that unexpected guests are often the hardest to weather. Eric proves that his capacity for worry is truly boundless.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A second update for you all today, enjoy!
> 
>  
> 
> Chapter title and Epigraph taken from Florence and the Machine's "Queen of Peace".

__Now you have me on the run  
The damage is already done  
Come on, is this what you want  
Cause you're driving me away

 

⨁

 

“Lord Eric,” Jack said dryly as Eric entered his chambers. 

 

It was near midday, and Jack hadn’t woken him early for practice that morning. Eric’s body woke him nonetheless, and the absence of Jack on a day they usually met stung more than it should have. Regular training had also been canceled, with Shitty coming by the barrack rooms to let the boys know. He also told Eric to pack his things. For a suspended moment between phrases Eric thought he was being thrown from the keep, sent home with his mother. 

 

“Relax, Your Lordship, Jack only asked that you be moved into the suite next to your mother,” Shitty had said, doing all of nothing to calm the racing of Eric’s heart. 

 

Jack looked down at the papers cover his table top. He was dressed nicely, more formal than he used to dress when alone in his room, as though he expected company at any moment. 

 

“Jack, you don’t have to call me—”

 

“I assume you’ll be able to entertain Her Ladyship for the afternoon while my men and I go out and check the countryside.” Jack needn’t be so cruel, Eric thought at the way he was distanced so thoroughly from the men who he had become to consider his friends. Jack’s tone was not biting or soured, but vacant as though he had nothing left in him to speak to Eric. A roaring fire leaped forth in Eric, bringing staunch heat to his blood, coloring his face and sending a burst of sweat down his back. With almost wavering willpower he calmed himself and replied as evenly as possible.

 

“Yes, I am more than capable of keeping my mother busy.”

 

Jack looked up for the first time since Eric had entered. His eyes were the same disarming blue, and yet there was none of the intensity that had always been there. Gone was the archer’s focus. In its place was an apathy that was almost colder than the chill wind that howled outside the frosted window. 

 

“Good. Will that be all,  _ Lord _ Eric?”

 

“Yes,” Eric said, taking the dismissal as it was with no less bitterness than it deserved. If he shut the door more soundly than was entirely necessary, well, the handle had slipped from his loose grip.

 

⨁

 

Suzanne was tucked away in a lounge that connected her suite with Eric’s. The room was lit brightly through the broadsided windows of a large alcove that stretched the majority of the main wall and reach out over the forest that rose from the ground several tens of feet below. A thick embroidered duvet covered her legs, no doubt to beat back the cold that she had yet to acclimate to. Eric walked in and, feeling on the verge of frustration-induce tears, threw himself down on a divan across from his mother’s.

 

She said nothing for a long time as Eric slowly settled, the heated fire ebbing away until only an aching hurt remained. After a stretch Eric recognized the sound of turning pages, and looked up from where he was sprawled to see his mother paging through one of the Bittle family cooking tomes. It was thick and yellowed with age, and something that had no right being taken from the household. Eric almost left his skin when he saw it resting open on the unassuming pine table, hundreds of miles from the locked steel cabinet in which it normally sat with its siblings. 

 

“Mother!” he said in a startlingly and uncharacteristic shrill squeal, jumping from his cushion and landing on the other divan next to Suzanne. She smiled coyly at him, adjusting the duvet where his landing had shifted it from her lap. 

 

“Hush, Dicky. You are much too loud for recipe browsing,” she said, flipping another page. From the ornamentation along the head of the page Eric could tell she was looking through main dishes, ones that he rarely made (if ever) for love of the pastries and sweeter things toward the back of this particular text. 

 

“These northerners may know how to make a hearty stew, but their meat was horribly cooked. Overall it left much,  _ much _ to be desired,” Suzanne said with the authority due to one born of the Bittle-Phelps. The two families were notorious for their culinary craft amongst the south, fighting once in a war against another family for possession of a particularly insignificant bay in the grand scheme of things. But it was said by many of the older generations that the fish there tasted like little else, though Eric knew of only the bay as hearsay. Nevertheless, food was central to the Bittle family, Eric’s mother herself was the head of the kitchen at home, with her own mother’s guidance. Nothing was made in the kitchen to be served to the household without Suzanne’s say. 

 

“Your chevalier has rode out to save some poor, impoverished serfs and peasants?” she asked pointedly, looking down at the recipe book in a way that suggested it was only for Eric’s benefit. 

 

“ _ Mama! _ Jack is  _ not _ my chevalier, nor are the people in Samwell serfs or simple minded. They are quite good people,” Eric said, feeling a stab of anger toward his mother’s callous treatment of Jack and his people, whether he was riotously mad at the northern knight had little to do with if he deserved such harsh treatment. 

 

“Well, the way he looked at you at supper last night when he thought I wouldn’t see suggested otherwise,” Suzanne said, leaning back to look at Eric shrewdly. Her headdress today was yellow, adorned at the crown with simple amber stones and the curling embroidery of soft brown boughs. “You know, I have always liked the idea of you being protected by someone as befitting of your … nature.”

 

A tart taste entered Eric’s mouth as he pursed his lips, casting his mother the coolest look he thought he’d be able to get away with. She returned his gaze relaxed, though underneath Eric could see how unmoored she seemed if the set of her hands atop her lap was any indication. Eric was her only child, there were no others. And if Eric were to choose Jack, as ridiculous as the presumption of his mother’s was, their particular line of the Bittle-Phelps family would end with him. His father would never accept news of that, nor did Eric think would his mother in any serious sense. 

 

“My nature, or my ailment?” Eric asked sharply. His mother had been with him less than a day and already Eric was wishing that she would depart again for the south. He had forgotten, in his time away, that their conversations more often than not these days dissolved into an incessant squabble.

 

“Both, though I am sure he knows neither of your statuses,” She said, turning her attention back to the tome and effectively ending the conversation as she had started it, by her say. 

 

⨁ 

 

Supper that evening was accompanied by a dish that Suzanne had made herself. Her servants had kindly asked the keep’s kitchen staff to step from the kitchen while she worked. Few actually looked at the recipes who were not Bittle by birth. A tradition that had saved many would be thieves from pilfering what was most precious, though Eric thought no real shame would be brought upon them if their roast beef recipe escaped their care. 

 

The table was set as it had been the prior evening, with Suzanne at the place of honor next to the head of the table. Eric sat abreast her. Jack’s place was left empty, as were Shitty, Ransom, and Holster’s. Suzanne seemed perturbed that Lardo once again sat with them at the head table, though she was less displeased as she had been the first night when she’d seen Lardo walk into the great hall in leggings and a loose-fitting tunic, her hair shorn short at the chin and realized she was a woman. 

 

The last dinner had been… less than ideal. Shitty first and foremost testing Suzanne’s strength. Eric had almost smiled at the great pain it took her to address him by name. Finally she had succumbed to calling him ‘Sir Crappy’ only once, and then simply ‘Sir Knight’ if she were forced to address him at all. Ransom and Holster (Sirs Oluransi and Birkholtz) had been uncharacteristically silent, not even poking jest at one another as they might have done. Eric’s own spot at the table chaffed like a horrible rash, and Jack’s attitude was no better. 

 

Cold and awkward in tone, proving only to become more stilted as the evening had drawn on, it was clear that Jack was miserable and doing little to hide the fact. Suzanne had taken this charitably in stride, for her, only poking at Jack’s weakness with sparing frequency. She asked questions of geniality, imploring Jack to speak at length about the health of his father and mother. Robert, as Eric had learned with great shock, once traveled down to the south for a tournament in the early days of his youth. There he had met some of the Bittles in passing. Suzanne had met him for less than a moment, and promptly decided his handsomeness knew little competition in the north (or even the south, she would claim were she out of earshot of her husband-to-be).

 

Jack took this with uncomfortable grace, thanking Suzanne for her kindness. When it was an appropriate hour, Jack had fled from the great hall. Eric and his mother stayed only a little longer before they too left, turning into bed. Suzanne had been surprised when Eric left to another part of the keep. 

 

“Mama, I dorm with the other boys my age.”

 

Suzanne had mocked this with a sharp laugh.

 

“How quant, bless their hearts,” She’d said. “They surely had no idea who you were, did they?”

 

Eric had told her of the problems she had caused with her arrival. 

 

“Blame your father, Dicky. He wanted no connection to the Bittle name when we sent you away,” she said this with more emotion than Eric had expected. “Part of me wondered if I would ever see you again, living or dead. They surely could not have returned your remains if they hadn’t a clue who you belonged to.”

 

Eric left her then, unable to consider what she implied. The way she had suggest an ownership of Eric by the Bittle family settled in him sourly in a way that allying himself to the family name had never done before. Perhaps it was in part due to the conversation. Something about it didn’t sit right with him. 

 

⨁

 

Dinner passed and night fell full on the land longer after which Eric sat up waiting for the men to return. As the hours began falling from the night and moving unceasingly toward morning Eric grew nervous and began to pace in his too-large bedchamber. Finally refusing to wait in his suite any longer, Eric sought out Lardo’s chambers far in heart of the keep. 

 

He found her dwelling after a time. Unknowing of the time of the morning, but spurred on by a light that bled softly from under her door, he continued course. He only had to knock once before it opened, revealing Lardo in the same attire she had worn to supper. She looked as though she hadn’t slept either, her hair messied no doubt from where her fingers had gone through it. 

 

“It is stupid to worry,” she said as Eric stepped into her room. It sounded as though she was chastising  _ Eric _ for coming to her. “But they said they would be back for supper, and now it is well into the morning. I would have sent more knights, but I have neither the authority nor the selfishness to wake them and send wilds that now hold up the others.”

 

“I cannot bear to wait here any longer.” Eric hoped that Lardo would support him. It was the only thing he could think of, not that his mind was planning much as it was dominated by intricate worry after worry. 

 

“Go get dressed, give me a quarter hour to ready our gear,” Lardo said. 

  
With a lump in his throat Eric dashed from the room, marking a path toward the barracks. He only hoped that whatever Lardo and he found out in the woods was a kind meeting. He feared to think of encountering one of the  _ black dogs _ , or whatever had killed the farmers and burned their house to ember and coals. Eric quickened his pace and tried not to let panic over take his fire. 


	11. Cold Iron

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric and Lardo search for their missing friends. What they find could well bring an unending end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Much luck to everyone with this chapter. A warning, there is some description of injury and gore, so tread softly. Also I apologize for the sudden jerks in the narrative, a problem I think due to suddenly writing as I go without a plan. 
> 
>  
> 
> This chapter's epigraph comes from Pindar of Thebes, a Grecian poet for olympian victors.

 

_ But in a single portion of time _

_ the winds shift rapidly,  _

_ now here, now there _

 

⨁

 

Lardo and Eric mounted a horse and went eastward to the area of the farm lands and the ravaged house. They had little idea where their friends might be, but he’d suggested they start where the patrol may have. The ride was hard and cold, with little light to see by and a new layer of snow just beginning to fall. Eric clasped a heavy lantern in one of his gloved hands, holding it aloft over Lardo’s shoulder to see the way ahead. Its meager, billowing light could hardly penetrate the impossible darkness that seeped from under the boughs of pine trees, blanketing snow covered roadway in itself. 

 

Eric was minutely aware of how exposed they were, marking themselves with a blazing mark as they rode through the night. Largo had taken a mid-length poleaxe alongside a shortsword. She looked more prickled than a cactus pear, armed so thoroughly that while Eric feared what moved in the night, he possibly feared Lardo slightly more. 

 

They arrived to the burned remains of the house, weak light from the full moon only just peaking through a dense bank of clouds. There was nothing at the house, not even tracks of any kind. The snow was untouched save for where old, frozen tracks were being filled by the wind that whipped across the fields, blowing the pillowy new dusting into light mounds.

 

They were about to turn around when Lardo saw a glint of something off in the field, catching off the low lamplight. They dismounted, walking carefully over the snow-covered hewn back corn stalks. There, nestled in a shifting bank of snow, was a single crossbow bolt, iron tip pointed to the sky. 

 

“A missed shot from the time of the fire?” Eric asked, unsure of what it meant to find a bolt out in the middle of the field. He looked around, seeing only that fresh snow had obscured the ground even more. 

 

“No.” Lardo picked up the bolt and turned it over. It looked different up close, the tip was more refined and unmarked by scarring. There was a nasty barbed edge along both sides of the point that would tear at flesh when it was removed. “This is one I made. Only Ransom and Holster carry bolts like these.”

 

Eric stood from where he had been crouching next to Lardo in the snow. He lifted the lamp even higher, trying to illuminate whatever he was looking for in the dark. Again, far into the distance the glint of metal shown back through the night. 

 

“There’s another!”

 

He and lardo moved to it hastily. Only the metal point once again pointed up from the snow, the only way they would have been able to see it. This one was again unmarked and showed no indication of having been fired. There were no signs of struggle, but the wind had begun to pick up as night had fallen, carrying the snow in swirling clouds. If the others had been attacked early in the afternoon any sign of it could be long erased by the moving air.

 

They went back to the horse to gather what gear they could carry. Lardo sent it back with a firm swat to the rear. It trotted in place for a moment before marking its way back the direction they had come. Eric worried for its safety before gathering himself and setting off again in the direction the bolts led. 

 

For countless paces they walked, searching for another glint of metal in the thick snow. After several minutes Eric began to fear that they had somehow lost the trail, when in the distance another bolt gleamed. This one was only visible by a length of the shaft which had been revealed by a chance breeze. It pointed to the left, toward where the forest had not yet been cleared away for farmland. Pine and leafless oak boughs stretched into the sky, a deep black against midnight blue. 

 

“I don’t like this,” Lardo said, tucking the bolt away in a sack that hung from her belt. “Let’s go, Bitty.”

 

They entered the copse of trees carefully, keeping close watch for things moving in the low-hanging branches. The men’s tracks were more visible, accented every several feet by a bolt stuck clearly in the thick bark of the barren oak trees. The blood also was clear without the wind present to cover it with snow. Dotting trails of aged blood gone to rust marked the earth. It was unclear how severe the injury was, or how many were wounded. If anything, it pushed Eric and Lardo faster. In fear of what had become of their friends, and what would become of them too, with blood in the air for the predators of the night to seek out. 

 

The blood began to thicken as they came upon a clearing in the woods, a giant tree sat directly in the middle. It stretched up, pushing through the overhanging canopy of some of the oaks that sat at the border of the clearing, their branches bending away from it as though avoiding its touch. There, laying against the tree’s thick trunk, where four bodies.

 

“No,” Lardo said weakly, moving immediately across the open space. From somewhere at a distance lost to the trees a mangled, throaty howl echoed out. 

 

Eric dashed next to Lardo, drawing his baselard with shaking hands. Lardo had her poleaxe out in front of her, turning slowly to scan the woods. They were exposed, standing in the middle distance between the woods and the tree where their friends likely lay dead. 

 

“Lardo, we need to pick a position,” Eric said, his rapidly exhaling breath thick and billowing white in the cold air. With some prompting, and a second closer cry from the woods, Eric got Lardo to move toward the tree.

 

There, sat next to each other as though they had slumped down to take a quick reprieve were Shitty, Holster, Ransom, and Jack. Bile rose hot in Eric’s throat as he saw blood fallen on the snow, a visible wound on Ransom’s right thigh, and another if the dark pack on Jack’s chest was to be believed. The light from Eric’s lantern fell softly on their faces, expressionless from lack of consciousness. 

 

Lardo stooped down, her hand shaking as she slowly reached out to Shitty. Suddenly his eyes snapped open and with an iron bolt in hand it rose quick to stab at Lardo’s exposed neck. He stopped just as she reeled back, bringing a knife of her own up to block the blow. 

 

The two stared at each other with what was probably the same earth-tilting shock that Eric felt. Then as quickly as the almost fight had ensued, Lardo threw her knife to the side and collapsed on Shitty in relief. 

 

“‘Bout time you two came to fetch us,” he said, his voice almost gone. “I don’t think Ransom or Jack are doing too well, though.”

 

Eric moved over to Holster. He snuffled once before waking from the slumber he was under. His glasses were gone, and in his panicked blindness he jerked back from Eric.

 

“Holster,  _ Holster _ !” Eric said, trying to calm the man. Beside them Ransom and Jack still lay unmoving. Dread rose in Eric’s chest as, while trying to calm Holster with his words, he reached out to touch Ransom’s shoulder and didn’t get a response. He wished desperately to put off checking Jack as long as he could, he didn’t know if he could bear what he discovered. 

 

The roar that had come from the woods twice before echoed again, this time so loud that it shocked the embers to light in Eric’s blood, knocking him over as his limbs jumped out of his control. He dropped the lantern in his shock. It fell end over end, crashing into the snow with a blanketed thud. The weak light sputtered only once before going out completely. 

 

A growl reverberated from the woods just across the clearing. The cloud cover slid from the moon as if it too wanted to see what lay in the woods. Slowly a  _ black dog _ stepped forth. Lardo’s breath caught, and at first Eric thought it was in response to the  _ dog  _ alone. Then Eric saw it. It’s right foreleg was missing almost all the flesh, and the hair was hewn back, revealing cold, almost grey flesh. It’s hide hung loose from its paunch, the innards of its body cavity trailing behind it in the snow. It blinked its leather eyelids, revealing nothing but a penetrating depth, as though the night’s dark itself could not compare to the lightlessness of where it eyes used to be.

 

“Lardo…” Eric said, his body frozen in place by the oppressive gravity of his fear. “What the hell is that?”

 

Lardo was speechless. The creature seemed to pause in front of where they had risen to protect the others. It was statue-like against the dark, unmoving. 

 

Then, weakly from behind, Shitty said, “Climb! Climb the tree!”

 

It was too late for that. As though triggered by Shitty’s plea, the creature leaped into motion, charging down toward Eric and Lardo at a breakneck charge. The thick, meaty thud of its organs slapping the snow brought genuine nausea to Eric’s fear. In the moments before the  _ dog _ came upon them, it was clear that even Eric’s fire was unable to act in the face of this. 

 

Lardo was the first to act, swinging the poleaxe around to face the oncoming force. She rammed the butt of the shaft into the earth. The creature moved without breath, no noise coming from what should have been pumping lungs deep in its chest. The dog leaped forward, and as it came down upon Lardo she levered the braced length of the axe into the loose skin over its left collar bone. 

 

The sudden force of the collision drove the poleaxe’s spear point through the creature, the curvature of the rest of the weapon’s head ripping away at dead flesh. It gave an unearthly scream, piercing the night as the wail echoed out. It survived three violent thrashes before it collapsed. Eric could see, at this distance, that several crossbow bolts were embedded in the coarse hair and thick skin across the creature’s back. Holster and Ransom, maybe even other unlucky victims, had tried to take this thing down at range, but were unsuccessful as the bolts obviously could not pierce the hide. 

 

Lardo and Eric stood across on opposite sides of the creature in the wake the resounding silence made. With stomach churning slowness the creature slipped down the length of the shaft, slumping into the snow. Shitty seemed even paler than before, and Holster, who could not see what had happened, gripped at Ransom’s still unconscious body with stunning ferocity.  

 

Eric was about to check on the others when the  _ dog’s _ massive, human-like front paw swung out and took him by legs. The blow of the open palm cleared his feet from under him, sending him briefly through the air. He returned to the earth with a bone jarring crash. He lay for a moment sprawled out in the snow and looked up. It was enough time that Eric missed what must have been a second, even more violent swing that soared where he had once stood. Lardo and Shitty cried out in horror.

 

“ _ Bitty! _ ” he heard Lardo shout clearly. The  _ dog  _ thrashed violently against the spear nailing it to the ground. The brittle sound of wood shattering accented the thump as the creature reanimated, rising on its own limbs. Eric rolled away from it as best as he was able, his lungs winded, still too stunned to stand under his own strength. 

 

The sound of fighting brought Eric back to his senses with panicked celerity. Lardo stood in front of the boys and deflected the creature’s swings with shaky blocks of her sword. Claws sparked hot against the cold steel, striking bright liminal flashes in the darkness. Eric tried to stand quietly, but the sound of his boots crunching the snow under foot triggered the creature’s attention. The  _ dog _ now stood between Eric and the others, facing away from the tree. It turned fully. Thick and black gelatinous blood streaked the snow underneath. With a roar it changed direction, bearing down on Eric faster than he knew what to do.

 

Again, as though some other instinct lived inside his body, Eric rolled out of the way, bringing his baselard upwards as he dodged. The sword cleaved cleanly through the rotted flesh of the right foreleg. Unbalanced, the  _ dog _ tipped over and crashed down into the earth beside Eric. 

 

It immediately rose back on three legs, unmoved by the absence of its limb.  Eric could still see the shattered wood of Lardo’s axe protruding from the thing’s chest, the metal tip rising from its back like a spine. 

 

Eric felt heat rush down from his heart to his fingers. His grip was almost crushing upon the hilt of the baselard. He waited as the creature turned and began to slowly circle around him, maintaining the distance between Eric and the group, he must have been flung at least ten feet, an incomprehensibly distance and one he felt he should not have survived intact. The creature kept away from the tree, circling back toward Eric’s right side. Lardo stood behind it, her face unreadable at this distance.

Again it leaped forward suddenly, tearing into the earth as it thrust itself into motion. Eric’s instincts braced himself, and when he thought it best to run, his body disobeyed and stepped out of the creature’s path only to give a turn with all his force. The baselard fell in an unseen arc and cleaved into the hard dome of the creature’s dense skull. 

 

The blow didn’t stun the creature. It wrench its head to the left, removing the sword’s cutting edge from where it had impaled into the hard bone. Eric’s entire right arm ached with the force of the first blow and the creature’s unphased movement. Its head was gaping open at the crown but heedless of this the  _ dog _ ran out a few paces and turned around, readying for another charge. 

 

It was then that another sound came from the other side of the clearing. Lardo turned to it, only to falter back at whatever she saw. From Eric’s position he could see an almost humanlike form slip out of the woods and walk slowly toward Lardo and the boys. Eric couldn’t afford to help, as the  _ dog _ loomed ready to make another charge

 

A voice called weakly, muffled by distance and the erratic beat of Eric’s heart. 

 

“Eric” Jack called. He spoke a string of words incomprehensible to Eric, spoke in the first language that Eric remembered hearing. Eric tried not to cry out at the relief he felt that Jack was alive, and the crushing reality that if the he did not kill the  _ dog, _ they would all be dead anyways. 

 

Jack’s voice again broke through the panicked fray of Eric’s mind. 

 

“ _ Fire _ , Eric,” He screamed in english. “Fire!”

 

Eric had no time to process this as he beast launched itself forward. Eric was not prepared for the distance of the leap, and found himself bodily crashing to the ground under the immense, incredibly cold weight of the thing. It bore down from above, crushing Eric’s sword hand violently down to the earth. He felt a bone in his wrist give way, and screamed out at the sharp pain that stabbed at him. 

 

_ Fire, _ Eirc thought desperately. Fire was one thing that he never truly seemed to be able to rid himself of, and now as he needed it most, there was nothing. Pain from the mangled arm raced up Eric’s arm, igniting a bone deep horror within. This was how he would die, belly up, crushed underfoot of a beast that would go on to kill his friends. 

 

A hot wetness overcame him as tears pooled and began to spill down the side of his face, rushing into the snow under the back of his head. The heat began to pool in his chest, racing down his uninjured arm. The tips of his fingers grew incredibly hot where they were pressed to his front by the  _ dog _ . It was beginning to rise up from Eric, leveraging its mouth so that it’s lower jaw might close down upon his exposed face. 

  
  


Eric struck at it with his left hand once he was able to free it, punching into the side of the creature neck. The heat grew and grew, and then it was not fear that propelled Eric, but a rage that came from so deep within him his blood sang with it and the pain and trauma around his body. 

 

With a shocking suddenness the gloved fingers of Eric’s left hand burst into flames at the intense heat there. He couldn’t even cry out in surprise as the fire, redder than summer cherries and with a pit of white heat at its core, ate away at the glove. The insulated leather lasting mere seconds, and finding no barrier left between his skin and the  _ dog’s _ , the flames jumped to its flesh and promptly ignited its fur on fire. 

 

The scream it released was at once thunderous and deafening. It leaped off Eric, already beginning to trail crippled, burning flesh in its wake as it threw itself into the snow in an attempt to extinguish the flames. Eric crawled on his backside, cradling his wounded arm as the creature thrashed. It continued to scream, the sound rising in pitch until it was near soul splitting at its peak. When the flame tongues melted through the creature’s skin into its hollowed-out chest cavity they billowed momentarily until, as though fuel to the fire, it exploded violently from within. Rivulets of still-burning meat and bone flew outward through the air. Eric was launched back by the wave of hot, foul smelling debris. 

 

The sound of further fighting ceased. Eric craned his neck around, seeing the last moment of Lardo barely fighting off the other creature before the arcing trails of fire that cascaded through the air began to rain down near it. With a cry entirely unlike the  _ black dog _ , the second creature took flight, disappearing into the shadowed trees as though it had never been. 

 

Lardo and Eric looked toward each other with the utter depthlessness of words. Shitty, who had watched with growing intensity, began to laugh in a way Eric had never heard before. It was loud, raucous, and hinted at the insanity of what had just occurred. Lardo sat, falling onto her backside in the snow. The burning flesh began to go out, replaced by the first rising tendrils of sunlight peeking out from the east, over tree tops marked with the still falling snow. 


	12. Believe In It

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> A morning after of sorts, part 2.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, another longer chapter for today. Angst is hard to write how come no one ever warned me. 
> 
>  
> 
> Epigraph from Susanne Sundfor's "Darlings"

_We thought love could change our names_  
_And free us from our earthly chains_  
_Oh we wanted to believe in it, to believe in it_  
_But they couldn't_

⨁

 

The sound of hooves over frozen earth, and crashing tree limbs echoed out through the forest as the sun slowly rose. Eric lay stomach up, his left and right arms buried in the snow, too tired to even rise at the sound. He couldn’t bring himself to look at the left hand, whatever might remain after it had lit itself ablaze, nor could he bear the pain that shot up the right every time he so much as shifted it. 

 

With the shuffle of horses, Lardo stood and dragged a physically exhausted but mostly uninjured Shitty to his feet. They turned and faced the oncoming strangers, swords drawn. Eric could see the exhaustion and mental wear apparent in the two. If a fight was coming, none of them would last very long.

 

Shock and relief battled each other for precedence in Eric’s battered mind when, with a full dazzle of color owed to the Bittle house banner, Suzanne rode into the clearing atop the horse which Lardo had sent back hours earlier. Behind her, in full battle regalia, came Sir Harper Forrow and two other knights from the Bittle house. 

 

Suzanne wasted little time dismounting, her high riding boots sinking into the snow. She stepped over the smoking remains of the dead  _ black dog _ as though the blasted apart flesh were a normal sight to find in a northern forest. Snow was stuck to the tempestuous cloud her headdress had become in the wind. She looked like a thunder bank, bearing down upon them hot and quick upon wild westerly winds. 

 

“ _ Eric Richard Bittle the Third _ you must think your mother to be a bigger fool than you,” she said, storming across the open space. “Sir Harper, have your men see to Eric’s equally foolish friends, will you.”

 

Suzanne crouched next to Eric, looking him over with clinical efficiency. Underneath the show of contempt for their foolishness, clear relief fell across her face. She must have seen his hands buried in the snow, as the look changed to quick and unrestrained worry.

 

“Show me your hands, Dicky.”

 

Eric shook his head, afraid for himself too what she might find. It had been almost ten years since Eric had last touched his own fire. The scars across his father’s side still held testament of the destruction they could wrought. 

 

“ _ Show me _ ,” she said, gripping the left forearm with fierce hands. The limb came out of the snow smoothly, reddened by the cold alone. The skin over the fingers was unharmed, looking rougher only because of Eric’s time training with Jack and the others. They both leaned back in relief, Eric almost brought to tears at the sight of it in tact. 

 

“And the other?” she asked as she quickly bound the left hand in strips of fabric ripped apart from Eric’s cloak, no doubt in an attempt to hide the fact that Eric had melted through his own glove and was entirely unscathed. 

 

“The other is simply broken, from the  _ dog _ .”

 

Suzanne looked at Eric for a long moment before turning back to where the crater of blasted snow and blackened fleshy debris sat. 

 

“A dog did this?” 

 

“A  _ dog _ you wish to never see yourself, yes.”

  
  


⨁

 

Suzanne had lain awake that night, waiting for the chevalier and his men to return. She’d known, from Dicky’s behavior alone at supper that evening, that something was very wrong in the northerner’s absence. When she’d heard Dicky’s chamber door open that morning, far too early to be a casual waking, she resolved to ensure her charming, sometimes incapable but sweet intentioned boy didn’t get himself killed. 

 

As she rode back atop the horse that had returned to the keep riderless, the boys wounded, and Larissa shaken beyond speech, riding the the wagon she’d commandeered for their transport, Suzanne felt how impossibly close she’d came to losing everything. Dicky had proven to be stronger than she had ever known. It was a realization that frightened her as much as it settled her frayed nerves. 

  
  


⨁

 

Eric refused to stay in his sick bed for longer than was necessary for his wounded arm to be bound and set into a sling, and for a short, entirely needed rest. When he woke he dressed as best he could with one arm and made his way to where Jack would be locked away in his room. 

 

He didn’t knock on the door, entering quickly before shutting it behind himself as softly as he could manage. The thick curtains were closed, the only real light coming from a low burning fire and a single candle set at Jack’s bedside. 

 

The man in question lay asleep under his duvet, supported by dense pillows. He was pale and ghostlike in the half light of the room. A thick cream bandage stretched across his broad chest, covering the wound that marked him from one of his pectorals across to the ribs on the other side. Suzanne had said, when Eric refused to sleep without hearing about his friends health first, that the cut was long but went no deeper than a half inch at the worst. 

 

Eric still wasn’t sure why exactly he was here. Part of him wanted to ensure that his friends were alive, and that he hadn’t dreamed their safe return. Yet he wasn’t searching out Ransom or Holster in the same way he was Jack, so it could not simply be called friendly concern alone. Another part of Eric could not stop hearing the terror in Jack’s voice, and the pleading way he’d called out for fire. Had Jack known what Eric could do? If so, how long had he known, and what did that mean for Eric’s place among the Candorines if he was this… thing, whatever it was. Nevertheless, Eric owed Jack thanks for saving him yet again, even if he hadn’t been the spark itself that ignited the  _ dog _ .  

 

It was easy to move a chair into place beside Jack’s bed. Simple enough to sit down next to the man, who slept soundly with easy breaths. It was far harder for Eric to settle his nerves and wait. Waiting was never something Eric had any talent for. He was one to act, and the inactivity of patience would likely put him into an early grave. 

 

⨁

 

Eric came to with the soft call of his name. He jerked upright from where he’d clearly fallen asleep in his chair. Jack was awake and looking just to the left of Eric with concern, not quite meeting his eyes. It must have gotten warmer in the room, as the folded back duvet reveal the entirety of Jack’s torso. His bare chest and exposed arms were a distraction that Eric could not afford in this moment.  

 

“Lord Eric, you should be in bed.”

 

If Jack had not just nearly died in the woods Eric would have reached across the small space between them and strangled him. It was as though nothing had changed since their last conversation, Jack still acting like an utter, insufferable fool with a single sentence. 

 

“Jack, for the love of god.  _ Do not _ speak to me like that right now,” Eric said, moving to stand. He felt a wave of heat in him that was not due to his anger alone. There were much better times for lighting the furniture on fire. “Not after what happened in those woods,  _ again _ , I might add.”

 

A silence fell between them. Jack looked everywhere but at Eric. To the fire, which had burned down to bare embers while they had slept. To the closed curtains, behind which actual daylight seemed to be pouring in. To the roof above. He seemed to notice the bandage on Eric’s arm when he finally looked back at Eric’s waiting gaze. 

 

“You shouldn’t be here, Bittle,” Jack said.

 

Eric stood and paced along the length of Jack’s bed, trying desperately to calm his tongue before he said something much too unkind for the both of them. 

 

“I am going to ignore that comment for the sake of my calm demeanor, what little is left,” Eric finally replied, stopping at the end of the bed. He rested his hand on the black pine wood. “Jack, I was more worried about you and the boys than I have ever been before in my life. I need you to know that.”

 

Jack flinched at this, and Eric could do nothing but wait as the other gathered himself. There was clear pain and indecision, at what, Eric wasn’t exactly sure. After several long minutes Eric’s position standing at the end of the bed began to remind him how truly exhausted he was. He relented to it, and carefully sat at the foot of Jack’s bed, far enough away so as not to touch his feet where they made a peak of the blue fabric. 

 

“I was sure we would die,” Jack said at last. His face was turned down into his clenched hands, working worriedly in his lap. “We had been running for our lives, fighting as best we could. We found the  _ heartwood _ tree. It saved us for long enough.”

 

Eric could remember the tree of course, unlike any oak or pine in the surrounding woods. But what it had done for them was unclear to him. There had been no sign of it doing anything but offering a surface for them to collapse against. 

 

“The tree?”

 

“Yes, the  _ heartwood _ . Few are left in the north, which is a blessing, truly. ”

 

Eric forgot how thick his voice could get in the morning, and the timbre of it made blood rush to his toes and sing in his ears in a way that was distinctly frustrating when Eric still wished to be annoyed with Jack. 

 

“It’s an evil organism, it sucks the energy from everything near it. That’s why you found us there. Nothing willingly goes near it, not even the  _ Ossa.” _

 

Eric’s blood went cold with dread. How long would they have lasted there, waiting in vain for someone to find them?  And then this thing, the dead  _ dog _ , clearly something had happened to it beyond what had brought about its death.

 

“That  _ dog _ was an  _ Ossa _ ?” Eric’s limited knowledge of the north was stretched to its thinnest. It explained, then, how the  _ dog _ had carried on far beyond when any living thing should have died.

 

“Yes, the  _ black dog  _ was actually an  _ Ossa,  _ turned after its death _.  _ There are often two, and clearly one had been destroyed by the farmers. So I thought that if we went out in search of the other...”

 

It made sense that Jack would try to kill the second, Eric thought. If they were anything like the vampires or werewolves of southern myth, the  _ Ossa _ probably turned their victims. Like a weed,  one would have to kill them at the root to rid them of the land. But if Jack had anticipated the presence of one more  _ Ossa _ in the woods, something had gone very wrong. 

 

“But there wasn’t just one, was there?” Eric asked, realizing what the other creature that attacked Lardo and fled when it was clear the first would die by fire. “There were several  _ Ossa _ ?”

 

Jack only nodded. He was pale faced, and Eric understood now why they had run toward the  _ Heartwood _ . Even if it was no real amnesty from the  _ Ossa _ , Eric found it preferable to being torn apart by a dead thing. Or worse, being turned by one, if that was something that could happen to a human. 

 

“Yes, and like all Slanted things, they do not take kindly to iron or fire.” Jack said this, and Eric’s dread was revitalized. This was what he had come to resolve, in part, Jack knowing of his fire. “But the hide of the  _ dog _ had thickened with death, and Holster and Ransom could do nothing to strike it with a lasting shot.”

 

“And the fire?” Eric asked.

 

“We northernmen are clearly not as prepared for the cold as you, Lord Bittle” Jack said with jest, a careful smile on his face. “We didn’t have a flint or steel. We hadn’t been thinking that far in advance.”

 

Eric felt bad laughing at this, at how closely they could have come to death. He also couldn’t allow himself to feel relief just yet. 

 

“And so when you called to me?”

 

“I’d hoped you had something with you to light a fire. Clearly I was right,” Jack replied, sinking back into the pillows behind him. Eric tucked his feet under himself, anxious and cold in a way that made him long to crawl under the sheets with Jack. He knew how stupid that was, for a multitude of reasons. “How  _ did _ you manage to light the flitt while underneath the  _ dog _ ?”

 

At some point in his life, Eric had lost count of the number of times he’d cried at the pure force of relief alone. Many times he’d come perilously close to being discovered, only for some trick of fate to allow otherwise. This time Jack’s mistaken assumption was the greatest blessing, and when Eric cried it was with thick and healthy sobs, sudden in a way that startled them both. Jack seemed shocked more so than Eric could bear, and with embarrassment he stood to leave, relief and shame rushing back and forth, ebbs and flows. 

 

Jack, perhaps misunderstanding Eric’s tears for having brought back to his mind the near death under maw of the beast, grabbed hold of his uninjured hand and pulled him forward into an awkward, sitting hug. That was more arms than anything else. 

 

“It’s done,” Jack said, rubbing softly at Eric’s back. “You survived, Bittle. That’s all that matters right now.” 

 

Eric couldn’t help but feel the lie that was implicit there. Another  _ Ossa _ still moved in the woods, posing a threat to everyone in Samwell, alongside the other slanted they already warded against. But for the moment, Eric relaxed minutely, his identity was safe. They stayed like that for a little longer, enough that Eric could leave having cried himself to contented silence. As the thick pine shut behind him, he wondered how often the two of them would find themselves like this, with nothing but carefully closed doors between them. 


	13. An Unexpected Arrival

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Things continue, as they often do, with an increase in things sometimes unwanted.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all, I'd like to give a short apology for the break in my update schedule. I thought it best to take a short break from daily writing, as I wanted to avoid becoming burnt out. I hope this brief update meets you all well. I hope for there to be more to come in the next few days.
> 
>  
> 
> Epigraph for this chapter is from Agnes Obel's "Fuel to the Fire"

_Do you want me on your mind_

_or do you want me to go on?_   
_I might be yours as sure as I can say_   
_be gone, be far away_

 

⨁

 

Eric was woke, some time in the days following the attack, early into the morning when the mid-winter light was still low and the sun yet unrisen. Suzanne stood near the bed, her face showing signs of weariness that she would not reveal to any, even at times her own son. That she opened herself to Eric only suggested the gravity of her visit.

 

“I’m leaving.”

 

“I know.”

 

And Eric had known, for as long as she had been, from the very moment he’d heard of her arrival, he had known that Lady Suzanne would leave as she’d come. Unannounced save for the very last moment, at her own say, and when it likely suited her best. Though Eric had long been aware of this fact, it was an odd feeling when he came once again face to face with the reality of his mother, a political force first and foremost. She created a wake in a small tidal pool, and it would suit Eric best for him to get out of the water and stay on dry land.

 

He’d yet to really understand why she had come. Seeing him was not a good enough reason alone. The Bittle’s could not afford to work in linear lines. And maybe, in time, Eric too would learn to take the curved approach to relationships, and loved. He hoped the time was a long way coming.

 

“You’ll never know how good it felt to see you again,” she said, sitting lightly at the edge of his bed. She was a column of yellow in the low light, her uncovered hair gone to gray at the edges lay loose upon a riding coat of almost the same shade. It was the color the Bittles wore for the winter season, to ward off frost and bring good health back to the family, and the land.

 

“I am glad to have seen you, Mama. Though I wish we’d had the chance to spend more time in the kitchens together,” Eric replied, trying to force as much genuine emotion into his words as he could.

 

Suzanne opened her mouth and began to speak, but the clatter of doors opening and closing in the adjoining room faltered her thought mid sentence. The clatter fell silent, and then after a pause a knock came to Eric’s chamber from the corridor outside.

 

“Come in!” Eric called, confused and unsure of the urgency that seemed implicit in the fervor of the raps to the hardwood door.

 

The door swung back to reveal Suzanne’s handmaiden, her hair already done up for travel. She was pink in the cheeks, and Eric could see in the light that poured in from the brightly lit corridor stray hairs dancing about where they had come loose.

 

Breathlessly she said, “I am to inform her ladyship that Lord Robert and Lady Alicia Zimmermann are to arrive to the Bastide of Samwell by sundown. The chevalier heard news only moments ago from their bannerman.”

 

Eric took this news with a jolt. He’d been under the impression that Jack and his parents were not on good terms, as reasoning for why he was alone in the keep that once had been a haven for the Zimmermann family at large. Suzanne, however, took the news with the poise that was to be expected of her. She stood, placing her hair over her right shoulder with a practiced play of her fingers.

 

“Thank you, Tamara. If you’d please notify Sir Harper and the men that we shall be staying for another night. Afterwards, come back and attend me in changing.”

 

The servant woman bowed briefly before disappearing once again down the corridor, leaving the door open behind her. Suzanne stood and made to leave the way Tamara had, turning only when she was almost out the door with it closed between herself and Eric.

 

“I guess we still have time to make one last meal for these northerners before I depart.”

 

And with that Eric was returned to his solitude.

 

⨁

 

Eric and Suzanne were unable to get into the kitchens, even when she asked to speak with the head of the household staff herself, until well into the afternoon. The place was a flurry of motion, feverish cooks adding large quantities of meat to the fire. The ovens exuded thick peels of baking pastries and bread. Suzanne surveyed this with a critical eye, identifying weaknesses in the dishes prepared like Jack might pinpoint failures in an opponent's defenses.

 

After deliberation, and seeking her deep wealth of memorized recipes (as the book would not be taken out in a kitchen as full of people, let alone northern ones) for several to prepare for the evening supper.

 

“The lord and lady will surely be here for the evening meal,” Suzanne had said as she and Eric sliced the navel oranges they had sent for from the market. These were early crops, just before the New Year, but would do well enough for what Suzanne had intended for them. While Eric loved making desserts the best between the two, he still turned to his mother in the kitchen. She had a wealth of knowledge beyond his age. It was a set of skills that were experienced over and over until they became instinctual, more than anything that could be given.  

 

Part of Eric hoped that the Zimmermanns would be delayed, and that come morning, with them still on the road, his mother could leave and they could all avoid what he felt was coming upon them. A meeting of lording families of the north and south had not happened, to his knowledge, since the Phelps family came into the kingship. This well could be the first time in over twenty years that a meeting between the parties (as casual as it might seem on the surface) took place.

 

“ _Dicky,_ ” his mother said, startling Eric from his worried thoughts. “If you knead that dough like a mule we’ll all be paying for it later. And trust me when I say, I don’t think these northerners and their pretty jaws are cut out for the cud-chewing they’ll need with your overworked dough.”

 

Eric took his mother’s chastisement in stride, thankful for the reprieve it offered from his cyclical, mind-numbing worry.

 

⨁

 

A second bannerman came just before the time dinner would normally be announced, claiming the Zimmermanns would be arriving within the hour. Eric heard of this from a kitchen staff, who was speaking in excitable tones with one of the knights-in-training that Eric was less familiar with. Suzanne finished placing her batch of pastries into the oven before turning to Eric, assessing him critically.

 

“You’ll clean up easily. Take watch for me,” she said, removing her massive apron. It was placed atop the workspace, releasing a fine layer of coarse flour dust that clouded the air thoroughly. “I will go and prepare myself.”

 

As she stepped away she checked the other batches, which had cooled and were waiting dinner.

 

“Mind the browned edges,” she said, exiting the kitchen. Eric took a bit of pride in knowing his knowledge of the northern ovens had given him a slight advantage over his mother. It wasn’t _his_ pastries which had gotten more thoroughly cooked than was entirely necessary.

 

Eric thought about this, and tried to make himself laugh with it for fear that mention of Jack or his parents would cast him into a pit of anxious dread so deep he’d never clamber back out under his own will. Maybe this was penance for Eric’s own unexpected parental visit. He could only imagine what Jack must have felt like surprised by this. Maybe less weak in the knees, when he’d learned of Suzanne’s visit, at least it had only been one lord or lady from a foreign land coming, and not a matching set. Not that she was any better unaccompanied, if Eric were honest.

 

He did not expect for Jack, who should by all rights be resting as much as he can, to find him just as he made to leave the kitchens with his task finished and the last of the pastries set to cool. Jack caught his attention as he left for his chambers, pulling him aside to speak in soft tones. Eric could not tell what startled him more, the fact that Jack was out of his room, or that he was dressed in a finely laced midnight blue suitcoat of the winter style. It did much to bring out the stark color of his eyes, in a way that once again left Eric in a powerless position before him.

 

“You and your mother are still here?” Jack asked, speaking in hushed, quickly accented english. Eric wondered how much of his stilted speech was due to nerves for his parents visit. It still did not explain the surprise in Jack’s voice at seeing Eric there in the corridor.

 

“Should she not be?” Eric asked, and then fully understanding what Jack had implied, and attempting to continue through the tightness of his chest, said “Had you expected me to go with her, without saying goodbye?”

 

It was a thought that sank cold and heavy against Eric’s already frayed nerves. That it was Jack himself who suggested it was even more difficult to weather. It was impossible to tell with him whether the implication that Eric had disappear without word was a wish or a worry.

 

“No! No, I euh…Thank you,” Jack said, suddenly turning red in the face, or as red as his pale skin ever seemed able to turn. “It pains me to admit, but my parents have learned of you both, through Shitty I’ve no doubt. They were, euh, eager to meet you.”

 

The shifting confusion in Eric’s mind must have been equally prevalent on his face, as Jack faltered again at another sentence.

 

“It is just—there has not been a family like yours in the north for a long while.”

 

Eric nodded, understanding and relieved that Jack’s parents seemed to be aware of the time between interactions of the families in what he understood to be the same colloquial way that Eric was. Maybe this visit was one more of interest and respect than any sort of political power manipulation like Eric feared.

 

“Well thank you, Jack.” Eric patted his arm lightly, knowing that even if it gave the other a jolt of unease, it settled some of Eric’s own nerves at the touch. Jack didn’t seem as put off as he might have guessed, offering a shy smile in return.

 

The sound of Faber hall’s great doors swinging open broke them efficiently apart. Voices rose in cheers and greeting, echoing down the short corridor from the hall to the kitchen. Jack looked to Eric, and with as much as a farewell as he ever gave, moved off to see to the arrival of his parents.

 

Eric was only paralyzed in watching Jack retreat down the hall for a single moment before the returning smell of his baking shook him into action. He still had to change into dinner attire, and see if his mother was ready. No doubt she’d been changed for well over half an hour, and was sat in Eric’s room with a change of clothes and a knowing look upon her face.

 

Mothers, Eric thought, might well be the end of him.


	14. Escape Artist

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The arrival of the Zimmermanns encourages more stress than is entirely necessary.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> As I am trying to write this for Nanowrimo I am at the point where I can't tell if I'm burnt out or just bad at writing. I've also realized I have no idea how to write angst in any satisfying way.

⨁

 

There was no formal etiquette Eric had ever been taught for dinner spent in the company of foreign lordships. It had never arisen during his upbringing, which had drilled him and his cousins with hours of lessons on proper manners, dressage, and speech. He thought, retrospectively, that it was because of his upbringing in the heart of the Phelps’ reign as to why he now had no idea what to do in the face of the Zimmermanns. The Phelps had nothing to do with the northern lords, and as a result, neither did any of their allied families.

 

Lady Suzanne seemed unperturbed by this as she led into the great hall, trailing a long skirt behind herself. her head was covered in a crimson headdress that fell down the length of her back, matching in hues the dress itself. Eric had no doubt that she had planned for an interaction between the two families, and thus an outfit in the Candorine colors was prepared. Eric walked behind her, aware of the gazes sent his way from the old tables where he might have once sat, prior to his mother’s arrival and his outing as the child of a lording family of the south. Chowder, Dex, and Nursey, all three who he hadn’t had much opportunity to speak with in near two weeks, looked on cautiously. Lardo, moved from her place at the head table along with Shitty, sat nearby Eric’s old spot. Holster and Ransom were nowhere in sight.

 

Scanning the tables as Eric walked past was in an effort to avoid dwelling on the reality of his final destination, where the Zimmermanns sat waiting at the far end of the hall. It was almost surreal, moving with stilted steps toward the head table where it sat above the rest of the hall on a small raised platform. From his place still halfway across the space Eric could Jack standing behind his father, who now sat at the head of the table. If there was a time as any to wish for the ability to turn ethereal, pass through walls like a ghost, or simply turn to ash instead of summon flames, it was now.

 

“Lord Robert, Lady Alicia,” Suzanne said as she reached the table, giving a short bow in respect. The Zimmermanns replied in turn, Lady Alicia standing to walk with Suzanne over to her seat, which sat directly the opposite of her own. Eric couldn’t help but notice this left his place to face directly with Jack, something that thankfully had not happened until now. “Might I introduce you to my son, Lord Eric.”

 

Eric felt the gaze of all three Zimmermanns turn to him as though they each had a physical weight. Robert, who was shockingly similar to Jack in looks (or more appropriately, Jack was unnaturally like Robert in many regards) turned bright earthy eyes, unaged by time like the rest of his features seemed to be, on Eric’s slight frame. His face was marked with smile and frown lines in a way that suggested genuineness of emotion. Even in this short moment he had a manner about him Eric could almost feel. An energy maybe, one that most likely garnered a popularity with the people he lorded over. Alicia, when she turned her blue saucer eyes on him, was entirely disarming in the way that not even Jack (and his mother’s borrowed eyes) could manage. Her blond hair was tinged with gold in a way that Suzanne’s might have been, had it not begun to grey at an early age. She seemed extremely sharp minded, her face revealing little save that her attention was turned to Eric.  

 

“Greetings, Lord Robert, Lady Alicia,” Eric spoke over the nerves desperately trying to clinch his lungs closed, taking the opportunity to bow more deeply than was necessary. There was a moment of relief when he was able to break from the other’s weighted, almost unshakable gaze.

 

Suzanne and the Zimmermanns moved slowly into polite, careful conversation as the first of several courses were plated and served. The entirety of the first and into the second rounds Eric sat silently, picking at his plate with little appetite. Jack seemed to be of a similar mind, though he devoured his portion with detached efficiency. He looked toward over the table maybe once when Eric was aware of it, and only then lingered a second in his gaze before turning it down to his plate. The table, devoid of Shitty, Lardo or the others, was silent at their end.

 

It couldn’t last forever, unfortunately.

 

“Your mother tells me you helped make this,” Alicia said conversationally, holding atop her wintry ceramic plate a slice from one of Eric’s loaves of bread. She’d taken a careful bite, and the smile on her face was not as unkind as it often was when people in the south heard of Eric’s prolific baking skill.

 

“Yes, ma’am. I learned from the best.”

 

Suzanne scoffed at the compliment, giving little time for a rebuttal when she said, “Hardly, the boy was sneaking into the kitchen to make things from the moment he discovered where the family cookbooks were.”

 

Robert and Alicia chuckled dryly at this, the significance of the statement not landing for them in the way it might have for a family acquainted with the Bittle clan. Jack was listening with marked intensity, waiting on every word as his father spoke.

 

“I hear from Sir Knight that you spend as much time in the kitchen as you do training with Jack.”

 

It was clearly a light attempt at continuing the conversation, but from the way Jack seemed to still it was not a good subject to dwell on.

 

“Well, I am sure that Sh–Sir Knight is prone to hyperbole,” Eric replied, aware now that his mother’s eyes were on him.

 

“He spends much more time practicing with the boys,” Jack interjected.

 

“I had heard from my bannerman than when he arrived it had just been you two up in the early hours of the morning, sparring with those dreadful wooden playthings,” Suzanne said in jest, though it clearly made Jack uncomfortable.  Eric felt it was odd that Jack would distance himself from his hard work, even if he was perhaps ashamed to have spent as much time with Eric as he had.

“Jack is the reason I have been doing so well recently, in my training and the times with the…”

 

Eric drew to silence, unsure if it was wise to talk openly about his and Jack’s encounters in the woods. No doubt both Zimmermann’s knew both had occurred, but Eric’s role in it was still unsure.

 

“I heard from the others that you saved Jack’s life not even a week prior,” Alicia said, placing a hand on his shoulder closest to her. Jack struck a sour face, and unease rose hard in Eric’s heart. Robert seemed to be deeply interested in this, turning away a servant when they came forward to offer more food. He leaned into the conversation.

 

“I supposed your history with cooking explains how you manage to light an _Ossa_ on fire from beneath it. How _did_ you manage that?” Robert asked, near mirthful at the idea of Eric laying underneath the thing, lighting it ablaze.

 

“I’d been in the forest with Robert when he and his men encountered one. The _Ossa_ was a horrifying thing,” Alicia added, turning toward Suzanne conversationally. “It is incredible how the hand shakes when you need to strike a flame alight. It is almost as though your nerves want you to be harmed, the way they fight your motion so.”

 

Eric could feel bile churn horrifyingly close to his mouth, as though he stood on the edge of releasing himself and all his emotions onto the table in front of them. Jack seemed to pick up on how  uncomfortable Eric had become, shifting forward to speak.

 

“Maman” he said softly. “I don’t think that Eric likes to think about–”

 

Suddenly Tamara came forward to the table, bearing a large and artfully wrapped package in supple leather.  Suzanne stood, cutting Jack off while words fell unheard from his mouth. She took the package and sent Tamara away. It was as if she had planned for the woman to come at the most opportune time, throwing thoughts at the table from the direction down which their conversation had gone.

 

“A present for you both in honor of your hospitality. It has been long since our families have met in good humor,” Suzanne placed the large parcel in front of Alicia, who had her plates cleared the moment she saw the package. Eric caught his mother’s gaze once. As she walked back to sit at her side of the table. There was a grimness there which was gone the moment she once again faced the Zimmermanns.

 

The leather wrapping was pulled away with careful grace, revealing a large, thickly folded mass underneath. Alicia gave a breath of awe, stepping back from the table so that she might have her servant assist in opening the wrappings. Together her and two others pulled open the massive, quilted duvet. It was blazon in the reds, oranges, and striking yellows of the northern autumnal trees. Trunks of oaks were abundant in the quilting, skillfully included in the patchwork as though they had grown from the very quilte earth itself.

 

“Many thanks to you, Lady Suzanne,” Robert said, pleased by the thoughtfulness it seemed of Eric’s mother. Jack looked on with a careful set to his face that Eric knew came when he was deep in thought. Eric mirrored his look, no doubt. It was peculiar that Suzanne would have the quilt stylized in a manner that so closely reflected the sigil of the Bittle house, down to the very placement of the trees. Perhaps it wasn’t intentional. There was little doubt in Eric’s mind, however, that Suzanne had done it on purpose. She had the mind and the means for it, though he still did not know the purpose.

 

The gift seemed to signal the end of dinner. Suzanne once again stood, sharing pleasantries with the Zimmermanns.

 

“I depart early in the morn for home, so I will beg off to sleep now.”

 

The Zimmermanns each stood, Robert giving a bow before her, and Alicia placing a companionably kiss to her cheeks. Suzanne left the hall with grace and a smile that, if Eric looked closely enough, he might see the cracks in its false performance. Whatever had just happened, he would never understand fully unless she told him herself. It was good, then, that he was used to the unknowing.

 

⨁

 

In the morning Eric woke to a heavy weight next to him under the bedcovers. He turned over, pulling back the thick duvet to reveal the family cookbook his mother had brought with. Tucked into the top was a note scrawled on yellowed parchment paper.

 

_Dicky, keep this safe for me. I fear you’ll need it soon enough, if that last meal was any indication._

_S._

 

At the bottom of the scrap of parchment was a single, quickly drawn rabbit. It brought tears quickly to Eric’s face, and a bittersweet smile. The rabbit had always been something they drew at the end of shared letters (the kind sent by a young child between the rooms of one’s home). It had been a send off ever since he was young and had made his own house sigil. It spoke of the love that Suzanne didn’t always voice herself.

 

When Eric was fully dressed, he snuck away into the library. He had no idea how the keep organized their collection, but he went to the further spot possible, and climbing higher on the shelves than was most likely appropriate, he hid the book away unseen.

 

⨁

 

Eric asked to be moved back in with the boys that night. It was a tense event, Eric carrying his little things into the room. It hadn’t changed since he had last slept there, but the air seemed to move differently. Nursey, whose bed was next to Eric, watched him wordlessly as he but his spare clothes back where they had been before his move.

 

“I am so glad you’re back, Bitty!” Chowder said loudly when he came back to the room, seeing Eric sitting at the end of his straw mattress.

 

“Why are you back?” Dex asked, an edge to his voice. “It can’t be for the grand accommodations.”

 

Chowder frowned at this, and Nursey gave Dex a look that between the two most likely conveyed some form of chastisement. Eric didn’t have the energy to argue, and when the light began to fade he pulled the thin sheet over his head and went to sleep.

 

⨁

 

In the morning, unwoken by Jack, Eric rose and dressed for practice. It was still early, much too early for the others to have risen yet. He made his way on soft feet down the long and empty corridors, until he was able to slip out a door and come upon the training field already cleared for the day.

 

Jack stood in the middle, his back turned to Eric. He was doing sword motions, a mixture of arcing swings and pretend blocks against an unseen foe. His steps were light as he repeated the motions again and again. Eric allowed himself to watch until the chill air leached any residual heat from his hands, and then without allowing himself time to worry or react, he stepped forward to meet his blade with Jack’s.

 

The blow startled Jack out of his motion. He dropped his sword arm, stepping back from where Eric held his baselard aloft. Sometime after the attack in the woods Eric had begun strength training with his blade, carrying it so that his still too-thin limbs might be able to use the sword more easily. It wasn’t a question when his fire was present, it seemed to almost act in place of Eric’s body, possessing his arms and legs from within. But Eric worried for the moment when the fire failed to light, and he was left defenseless.

 

Jack seemed surprised to see Eric up at such an hour, let alone knocking blades with him.

 

“Lord Eric,” he began.

 

Eric gave him a single piercing look.

 

“Euh, Bittle” Jack started again. “I didn’t expect you.”

 

“You didn’t wake me for training,” Eric replied softly, stepping forward in an effort to get Jack to raise his sword again so that they might spar. “You haven’t since my mother came. Though I might add, should you even be training, you were injured so recently.”

 

The sword in Jack’s hand was still pushed tip first into the crushed earth and snow.

 

“It is better if I stay out of bed. I meant no offence, Bittle. I just thought maybe it would be improper for your mother to see her son being trained by…”

 

Eric knew very little of what made Jack’s mind worked. He seemed to fall between constant, rapturously deep thought, and utter vacancy of emotion. Here, though, Eric could see that Jack’s nerves were more present than they had been even at the dinner two nights prior.

 

“I was never allowed to train with the other boys. Here at the keep was the first time I had ever really been allowed to… train, or whatever it is that we really do” Eric said. He wanted desperately to tell Jack. Maybe it was foolish, but the more time that passed, the longer the idea of Jack knowing rode in his mind, the more enticing the idea sounded. Perhaps it would endanger Eric, but he was so tired.

 

“But why? you would have such solid skill if you were allowed the time to learn.”

 

“Thank you, Jack.” Eric started, and though he wanted to talk with Jack about this more than most things, more than he’d wanted anything in the near past, his voice was choked with unwelcome tears. “They thought something was wrong with me”

Jack was watching Eric with growing worry, startled most likely by the suddenness of Eric’s tears as they began to spill over his cheeks. His own inability to just voice his thoughts brought a wave of frustrated heat to his limbs and he turned, dropping the baselard in favor of running his gloved hands over his tear streaked face.

 

“Bittle, I do not know what you mean. There is nothing wrong with you.”

 

“But there is, Jack...” Eric tried but failed to keep his composure. The tears overpowered him fully.

 

Before he knew quite what was happening, Jack was turning around and surrounding him in a crushing grip, in spite of the injury which even in his teary-eyed mess Eric knew was just under Jack’s clothes. A warm breath passed over Eric’s forehead as Jack spoke softly into his hair. Eric was shocked to his core by the intimacy of the action.

 

“I cannot attest to their opinion” he said. “But if it is any consolation, I admire you more than is probably best.”

 

Eric allowed himself one last snuffle before pushing back at Jack gently. The arms around him relaxed, giving Eric the space to lean back and look at Jack’s naked, open expression. Before Eric’s courage failed him he reached up on arched toes and took the kiss from Jack’s lips he’d been thinking about for weeks now.


	15. Frost and Fire

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Ash and frost come to the forefront of Eric's struggles.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello again, I hope this update meets you all well. 
> 
> Epigraph from my poetry collection.

_ Ashes are fleeting, _

_ and when taken by the wind,  _

_ indiscernible from dust _

 

⨁ 

 

Eric was aware of the cold against his skin, and the slight breeze that tossed his hair where it lay, grown long in the winter months, against his forehead. Above all, he was conscious of the way Jack’s lips pressed against his softly, his head cradled by large callused hands. Jack’s chest warmed his palms, and Eric hoped his heart was beating just as rapidly. He wondered, if he kept his eyes closed for long enough, if the world would stop and he could keep embracing Jack like this forever. 

 

They pulled back, Eric almost awestruck by his own bravery and the result of such as were in front of him. Jack’s face opened in a way that it had never been before, his eyes showing a part of him that might have been there all along, but held close and hard to see from a distance. 

 

A noise echoed out from nearby, and they both turned to see the door begin to swing open. It was Eric who took a single step back, giving them the distance to feign some other, possibly less incriminating action. A servant in Zimmermman colors stepped out the door, their face dropping into relief upon seeing Jack. 

 

“Sir Zimmermann, His Lordship has asked that you meet with him in his chambers” they said, not stepping too far out the door so as that the cold breeze might not steal from them the heat of the interior. 

 

“Thank you, Thomas. I will be in shortly.”

 

Thomas nodded once and, after a short bow, shut the door after himself with a firm hand. This left Eric and Jack again alone with the still early morning and the empty practice field. Eric was aware at once of what they had just finished doing, and how in his action he hadn’t considered the hereafter. Stealing a kiss was one thing, living beyond it was something else entirely. 

 

Jack didn’t seem the regret it, however, if the way he continued to look at Eric was any indication. It was the same intensity that he’d once turned on Eric in disdain, assessing his strengths and finding them wanting of improvement. Now, though, his gaze’s intensity seemed to be kinder, more sharp in the way he looked from Eric’s eyes down to his lips and back up again. 

 

“I must go,” Jack said at last, breaking the tenuous silence between them. “Can we speak after I am done with my father?”

 

Eric still stood, unable to really think after what he’d gotten himself into. Part of him wished to pinch at his now cold-bitten cheeks to see if he wasn’t really dreaming. 

 

“Alright” he finally said as Jack kissed him quickly on the cold cheek. “Alright.”

 

Jack moved quickly to the door, and then as suddenly as the kiss had been upon them both, he was gone. Eric stood for a moment in the wake of it, his baselard sat waiting in the snow. He couldn’t feel his limbs over the fire that coursed under his skin. It would take him a long time, maybe never, to figure out whether that was a good or bad sensation.

 

⨁ 

 

Eric sought out Lardo in the deep reaches of the keep after breakfast was served and it was clear that Jack was still occupied with whatever his father had summoned him for. He found her where she normally resided, though there was a clear unsettledness to the air. The forge burned away but nothing lay ready to be heated, nor did she sit and polish any of the countless armaments as she sometimes did in her boredom between projects. 

 

She sat near the light of the forge, in her hands a scarred chestplate. It took Eric half a moment it realize it was Jack’s from the time in the woods, the  _ Ossa’s _ claw marks cleaving open the hard steel as though it were a children’s bedding cloth torn at the seam. A now familiar coldness settled over Eric as he walked toward Lardo, the sight of Jack’s nearness to death somehow even worse after their embrace. 

 

“Lardo?” Eric called, not wanting to startle the master of arms. “I wanted to check in with you, see how you are doing?”

 

Lardo was silent for a moment, her eyes locked on the reflection of herself, half surviving in the torn metal. Her right eye was obscured by the darkness of the open cut. 

 

“Is it normal to still feel like this after…after whatever it was that happened out there?” she asked quietly. Then laughed bitterly at herself, “though I suppose I ask the wrong person, Lord Eric.”

 

He did not feel the edge of his title sit harshly in her words the way it had in Jack’s the many times before. 

 

“I’ve only fought twice in my life,” Eric replied, sitting near Lardo but not so close as to infringe upon her careful space. “And both times have lingered with me. How could they not?”

Lardo nodded at this, finally setting the plate metal aside to look at Eric. Her eyes were darkly bruised, a sign of the lack of sleep she no doubt suffered. She appeared unwashed and weary, more so than she usually did after spending time near her work station. Part of Eric wondered if she hadn’t been spending time with Shitty as the other drank to process his own feelings. The encounter with the  _ Ossa _ had been more than anyone could have expected, and the repercussions more so. Holster still had not left Ransom’s side, who was still too wounded of the leg to be able to move from his bed. 

 

“I thought we would die out there,” Lardo said, standing to busy herself with work. She shuffled things about, not showing any clear intention save the mindless movement of her hands against the piles of things on one of her work benches. “How did we manage to survive that?”

 

Eric shook his head though she could not see it, feeling both the weight of old horror and the consistent presence of guilt weigh down on him. If he hadn’t had the fire, and whatever else that came with it, it was entirely possible that none of them would have survived. He couldn’t tell her this, though. It was more of a burden for her now than she or anyone deserved. That they had lived because of pure dumb luck and Eric’s own inherent predisposition for otherness alone was horrifying. 

 

Finally, deciding it best to remain as unaware of the proximity to their demise as possible, he said, “I’ve no idea, Lardo. But I’m glad we did.” 

 

⨁ 

 

By supper time Eric still hadn’t heard nor seen from Jack or any of the other Zimmermanns. He partly worried that something severe had happened (or was happening still). In their absence he was prompted to sit alone at the head table without any others of the keep to accompany him. Lardo and Shitty looked on from where they had been moved, but beside raise their chalices toward him, did nothing to absolve the growing worry in his gut. Holster and Ransom took their meals in the room, and the three boys seemingly too self-invested to even look toward Eric, save a few glances of Chowder’s that Eric caught when he was sure the other thought he wasn’t looking, offered nothing either.

 

Later, after leaving the great hall with dinner only half eaten and sitting in his stomach angrily, Eric paused outside Jack’s door. He knocked once, steady and firm on the pine. The chamber echoed the sound within, and after a few moments spent waiting for a reply, Eric went away, no lighter for the effort. If Jack was free, he was nowhere to be found that Eric knew. No doubt he was still with his father, off in the tower on the east end of the keep, where Eric had gone only once by mistake and would not go now uninvited.

 

⨁ 

 

That night, Eric fell head first into slumber and dreamed. 

 

⨁ 

 

Jack kissed Eric hotly and with intention, pulling color to his skin with quick bites, and soft moans from his mouth. It was hard to know where Eric’s body ended and Jack’s began and the way their limbs intertwined so thoroughly left little room for thought. They tumbled on top of each other, the messied sheets of a bed pulled back so that the cool air played against their exposed skin.

 

They had been like this for a timeless span, Jack holding Eric down against the soft mattress only for him to turn them both over again and place Eric on top. The positions were fluid, shifting, allowing for Eric to take what he wanted, hungrily, as Jack devoured his skin in sweeping passes of his tongue. It was warm in a way that he had never been before. No southern sunlight could really compare to this heat, born of friction and intimacy and the way Eric’s heart felt like it might burst from his chest.  

 

At length he felt a pillar of desire rise inside himself, building upon his coursing blood as if it were an earthen foundation. Each hot kiss and murmured word that Jack pressed into his skin weighed down on him from all sides, compressing his desire into a hard point of heat at his core. The sensation grew and grew until it reached a fever pitch, and with a cry, unfurled from within Eric in a single wave of release. 

 

Where desire had been, fire unspooled across the entirety of Eric’s small body opening red flames like flower petals into the half-lit room. Jack, pressed against Eric’s skin from chest to toe, screamed in confusion and pain as the heat ate away at his limbs. 

 

“Jack! Oh gods no… _ no! _ ”

 

They both could only cry as the flames burned hot and blue, violently billowing, until there was nothing left to do but for Eric to cry out as the world around him burned down to slowly dying embers. No time at all passed, and yet hours seemed to melt like the iron nails that had once held the bed together. Not even its hardened pine frame had remained to hold him up from the stone floor. He sat there on the rough cobble, horror and grief sudden to him, shocked by the quickness of it all. He cried roughly to himself until a voice spoke from someplace in the unlit parts of the room.

 

“ _ Why? _ ” it said with a grave and echoing ferocity that echoed within Eric’s bones. Eric asked the same question to himself in honesty. Then, “why do you ruin my craft,  _ little ember _ ?”

 

Eric’s tears were hot and wet against the skin of his face. He looked around to find the voice. 

 

“Who are you? Where are you?”

 

A shifting sound of leather against leather, like snakeskin, floated around Eric in the dark.

 

“Why do you fight me,  _ Flame of the South _ ? Go back to your lands, to your people. Your  _ gods _ cannot see you here.”

 

Eric stood then, aware that he had nothing but the ashes of Jack’s ruined body to clothe him. Bitter death was hot in his mouth, and he knew that if he had to fight now, nothing would survive the flames. 

 

Then a figure stepped from the darkness in the way a cloud might divide itself from the fog. It’s outline visible only because of the intention of its movements and nothing more. Then, as though mimicking the rising of a dead moon, a crown of blue ice crested from the darkness as a crescent of light. Under it was a shrouded face, visible to Eric’s eyes by suggestion alone. 

 

“You will perish in ash and frost, I promise you this.”

 

A massive hand rose from the deep, taking Eric’s chest in a single grasp. His skin fell away, greyed with death and decay. His organ spilled forth and turned to molder. With a hollow sound he collapsed onto his hands and knees and roared in the voice of a  _ black dog _ . In his terror he knew what he had become.  An  _ Ossa,  _ hollow and lifeless but for a void that sat at his center like a black sun. He turned to the figure and reared back, his lungless chest howling.

 

⨁ 

 

Eric woke with a scream, wet from crown to heel. His chest heaved as though he’d just run from the manor house of his childhood to the peach orchard in the mid of a june heat. The other boys slept on as though nothing had occurred, yet Eric had to remove himself from his bed, drenched to the bone, and slip out of his clothes. 

 

It wasn’t until he stood there, naked and shivering, that he allowed himself to take one long breath. He pulled again at another, and again at the air slowly. Whatever nightmare had befallen him, it was gone, it had lasted only liminally. Though he could already feel it begin to eat away at his remaining ability to sleep. Eric dressed in fresh things, and after bracing himself for another moment to collect his thoughts, slipped out of the room and into the night’s corridor beyond. 


	16. Stretch Your Eyes

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric finds solace in the night. Secrets are turned over in the light of day.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Things are continuing!!!
> 
> Epigraph from Agnes Obel's "Stretch Your Eyes" (if you haven't noticed yet, I am in love with this woman's music)

The dark and the ghost  
They dance so sweet and slow  
Dug-out from below there  
To damn the gods  
  
A grip that will hold  
So tight and close  
Around my throat with  
The weight of all our lives

⨁ 

 

Eric wandered the empty hallways, haunted by the voice of whoever had come into his dream and shaken him to his core. There was no true way of knowing what any of the dream’s images meant. The idea that even a fraction of the nightmare could true premonition brought real dread to his mind. If the voice was real, how could Jack burning by Eric’s own hands be anything less than a horrible prophecy? It was an unkind thought to have alone in the middle of the night. 

 

And truly, now that Eric was in the middle of hopefully momentary panic, when had the chevalier become so fond in his heart? Was it after the encounter with death (the second time) that Eric’s feelings had become clear, or had they been building upon themselves from the very first day, when Jack’s ice-blue eyes had nearly torn his rabbit heart into shreds with a glance alone. Maybe not that soon into their knowing, but it had been months now that they’d known each other, and weeks that they spent most of the day in the company of the other in one way or another. Less so, now that Jack knew of Eric’s heritage, and seemed to avoid him because of it. Not that Eric much blamed him. There was an animosity to being linked with the Phelps. Maybe one that was deserved. 

 

Eric found himself at length in front of Jack’s door. The corridor it sat along was empty of occupants save for the few torches which turned over softly from drafts that drifted, drawing goose flesh to Eric’s exposed arms and a shiver down the back of his neck as he walked. Physically he might have been able to knock, but he knew not if he had the emotional foundation to talk with Jack in person.  Not after what he’d seen and what he felt he was capable of.

 

After a long moment spent gazing at Jack’s closed door and weighing how much he should knock against how much he wanted to flee, Eric turned back down the way he’d come. It was then, by fortune or accident, that the man himself came around the corner. He was dressed still in the thick tunic of heathered green and the dark grey pants he’d worn that morning for practice. Eric was allowed the opportunity to look at Jack uninhibited as he stepped mutely down the hallway on tired feet, not looking up from a parchment that was held firmly in hand. Eric nearly let out a noise at the threat of being found waiting there, and in the way he thought field mice or rabbits might attempt to avoid befalling someone else’s dinner, he looked around for a place he might burrow into. It was a failing attempt, as the only nooks that would hide a body even his small size were further down the corridor, behind Jack’s approaching form. 

 

Eric, accepting what came before him, waited until Jack noticed him there in the way. He looked up with a start before realizing who was in front of him. A halfway smile rose from his exhausted face, making the weakness inherent in Eric knees at that moment even more prominent. 

 

“Bittle,” Jack said in way of greeting. He gave a fraction of a wider smile before some conversation in his mind must have shifted, and he suddenly looked remorseful at Eric standing alone in front of his door. “I’m sorry, I euh–I was with my father all day and…”

  
“You don’t need to apologize to me,” Eric replied, stepping further away so that Jack could open the door to his chambers himself. Inside the fire had gone out and the air was cold because of it. The room was entirely dark, the candles having gone unlit in Jack’s absence. After Jack placed his parchment on the desk, he gave Eric the match box. They went around the wide room bringing some light, Eric lighting the wicks with thin matches while Jack added wood to the fire to start it. 

 

“I just, I had a dream and I needed to stretch my legs, and my eyes” Eric said in way of an explanation as to why he was in front of Jack’s door in the middle of the night, when not even the torches were fully awake.  “I knew I wouldn’t get back to sleep if I tried, and I didn’t want to wake the others with my tossing, and I hoped that I might be able to find some relief in a walk and I somehow found myself–”

 

He was cut off from continuing by a hug that pulled him flush to Jack’s chest, crushing the matchbox's polished corners sharply against himself.  It surprised him into silence, not used to the familiarity of touching Jack outside of sparring, even after their prior embraces. 

 

“It’s good to see you,” Jack said into Eric’s hair, close breath bringing a chance of warmth to his chilled body. 

 

“I missed you,” Eric offered into Jack’s chest in reply, and he felt the truth of the statement in a warm contentment that rose in his chest. The way that their bodies joined close could do nothing but instill a comfort in him. But the closeness between them also brought the dream-watery sound of Jack’s screams to mind, and Eric physically removed himself from the other’s closed arms.

 

“I need to tell you something.”

 

Jack lay down bodily on his bed and, though Eric wanted desperately to join him, he remained standing, as close to the door as he could without seeming like he wanted to bolt (which he did, but he also wanted desperately for Jack not to know this).  Jack let out a long, wearied sigh, rubbing at his closed eyes before sitting back up to meet Eric’s shifty gaze. 

 

“I understand, Bittle,” he said, his voice beginning to take on heavier notes of accent in his exhaustion. “But could this perhaps wait for the morning?”

 

Eric felt words pushing up hungrily from within, eager to be spoken into the air between them. He wasn’t exactly sure what he’d say, how much of his secrets he’d lay out in the cold air of the night. The way Jack was looking at him, though, was unlike any way he’d done before. It was entirely soft, muted in the way sunlight sometimes was when it fell through foliage not quite dense enough to block it in its entirety. This was not the same Jack who had held Eric by his tunic and yelled at him from a few slim inches away. This was a Jack who Eric might tell everything to, if he wanted. This a Jack who Eric felt he was perilously close to loving, a feeling amazing and and terrifying in its reality. 

 

“Yes, I think it will last until tomorrow,” Eric relented, knowing that while he yearned to voice whatever was waiting to spring out of his cage of a mouth, he’d already held it in for this long. What would another few hours do but preserve the words that much more?

 

He turned to leave with a quiet goodnight but was stopped when Jack stepped from his bed. 

 

“Euh, Eri–Bit– _ Bitty _ ,” he stuttered, a high blush drawn to his pale face. “I was wondering if maybe… if you’d like to join me for the night.”

 

Eric stood like a scarecrow in one of his family’s fields, petrified where he was under the lintel of the door. In his mind the dream image of Jack burning to death sat astride the real vision of Jack, who looked at him with marked self-consciousness and a timid smile that seemed to be a little like hope. As much as it wasn’t a good idea, Eric felt himself beginning to cave at the thought of slipping under Jack’s thick duvet. 

 

“We wouldn’t…” Jack faltered to say, his blush surprising Eric by growing even more intensely red. “We would just be sleeping.”

 

Eric laughed and felt a lessening of his own stress. He smiled and stepped forward to help assuage the doubt that seemed to creep into Jack’s expression at Eric’s lack of a reply. Was he really going to do this? Were they?

 

“I was startled to think, Jack Laurent Zimmermann, that you might have thought me the kind of lady who removes her skirt hoops at the first sign of a promising mount.”

 

It was Jack’s turn to laugh and Eric’s to blush at this as his eyes roamed Eric’s thinly clad body. 

 

“No,” he said, sitting back on the bed with a weighted flump. “I thought not, but that didn’t stop me from wanting your company anyways.”

 

The companionable and jovial lightness replaced Eric’s fear long enough for him to allow Jack to pull them down under the covers. After blowing out all the flames save the fire in the hearth, they went to sleep with nothing more than a tender kiss. Eric allowed himself this, even though it felt as though nothing was real, and that somehow, hauntingly, dream and  reality had somewhere become intertwined. 

 

If anyone were to happen upon the room in the remaining hours of the early morning, they’d see only Jack laying on his back, and the slightest tuft of blonde hair which peeked just so from  under the wrapping of a thick arm. 

 

⨁ 

 

Eric dreamed of nothing while he slept in Jack’s company, something he did not realize until later. 

 

⨁ 

 

Waking in bed with Jack was much like any time Eric had been woken by him before. It happened much too early for Eric’s liking, and was accompanied by Jack’s face above his own wearing an almost leering sort of expression. This morning, however, was joined by a chaste kissed pressed quickly to Eric’s forehead before Jack slipped from the covers and, after removing all his clothing, stepped into the adjoined lavatory. Eric felt his skin grow hot at seeing Jack’s bare back, complete with the firm slopes of his rear, and the dark run of hair that fell between his arse and covered his equally embodied thighs. It was a sight Eric hadn’t the chance to see before, and was in fact a good reason as to why he remained in bed until Jack peeked out again, his face covered with a thin layer of soap suds so as to begin shaving.  

 

“I’ve begun drawing water for a bath, the fire beside needs a little while for the water to heat, but you can join me soon enough.”

 

_ Oh _ , Eric thought. They were suddenly on the plane of field in which Eric was not only allowed to see Jack in his entireness and also for him to see Eric in turn, but for them to share a bath together. It went beyond the simple intimacy of sharing a bed, toward the flowery suggestion of sensuality inherent in the act of bathing. Eric laughed to himself in disbelief and tried to calm his breathing.

 

He weighed down his almost hysterical mood with the reminder that there was still much to discuss before the day was done, and no better time to start than now. 

 

“Jack, we won’t need to wait long for the water to heat,” he said, peeling himself from the hot comfort of the duvet and then peeling his clothes from his body. Standing nude he felt more exposed than the time he’d thrown up in front of Jack, or before that, when he’d been physically thrown about by some of the other upper born boys who deemed him too weak. This was different, it was a nakedness of his choice alone.

 

With a bravery that was as much a creation of manufacture as any swindler’s smile might have been, Eric walked into the washroom of the lavatory. Jack was turned to a silver caste mirror, a razor in hand gliding weighted against his skin. He turned and, upon seeing Eric without clothes, put the small blade down and turned fully toward him. 

 

“The water needs a little while yet to heat, but you are more than welcome to brave the cold if you’d like” Jack said, his loquacity no doubt spurred on by Eric’s exposure. He was gentlemanly, not looking down once at the openness of Eric’s front.

 

“We needn’t wait” Eric replied, stepping closer to Jack. 

 

The other seemed confused, but in a way that might have been due to confused foreplay. As  Jack thought Eric had meant their joined bodies would heat the water enough for them. Eric could almost yearn for that as the cause.

 

“Bitty, I don’t know if you realize how cold…” Jack began, no doubt the beginning of a tartly jesting reply forming on his tongue.

 

“I would like the show you something, Jack” Eric cut him off, stepping toward where the bath water sat in a large stone basin, a fire started in a small chimney-like structure abreast the far side, where the basin touched the outerwall. 

 

“Okay” Jack replied simply, more confusion on his face than had been there before. 

 

“I’m sorry for this,” Eric said, and without succumbing to his fear, allowed the heat that had been waiting under his skin to unfurl. He knew of no other way to begin this without the sight of it alone. He couldn’t risk Jack misunderstanding his words, not with something as important and raw as this. 

 

Red flames lit along the length of Eric’s right hand. They bloomed and rose only a few inches, trailing thin streams of wavering air into the light. They creeped slowly toward his wrist before Eric, with what little control he actually was able to exert, stopped the flames from moving too quickly. 

 

Jack stood like a statue, his eyes locked on Eric’s arm ablaze. He had lost what little color his white skin normally held, and Eric knew  at once that what might follow would not be good for either of them.

 

“Eric” he said in a voice that shook only once, “please lower your hand into the water.”

 

Eric did as he was told, lowering the flame-engulfed appendage into the bath water. It gave off a quick screech before the water wrapped thoroughly around the flames which were untouched, blanketed as they were by a bubble of air. The water began to boil after a short moment, the color of the flames dancing in the frothing water. 

 

Jack watched, his eyes rapt upon the dancing water’s surface. Eric had never seen his fire like this before, had never known the fullness of the sensation pressed down by weight of the water. 

 

“What  _ are _ you?” 

 

Eric felt a jab at his heart at that, and let the flames die out. Water rushed the meet his skin, and the sensation was a jarring as Jack’s query. Part of him wondered when the shouting would come, and regretted that it hadn’t come right away. It was easier to handle when the violence of words came upon him like a wave, with sudden force, than as a slow boil. It hurt less in the aftermath. 

 

“I have no idea” Eric said, in the way he’d said the same to Lardo about their survival of the  _ Ossa _ . But now he was entirely true in his words. He had not even the slightest clue who or what he was, if he’d been born like this, or cursed like the children under his family’s house taunted him with after others had learned of the source of his father’s scars. 

 

Jack took a careful step forward, his hand held out as though to calm the very air with his touch. With trepidation alive in his fingers he reached out and brushed his pink skin against Eric’s own. His skin wasn’t hot to the touch, anymore so than a normal hand might be in the vicinity of a lover. 

 

“Does it hurt?” Jack asked. Eric could almost cry at the worry that sounded from his words. 

 

“No, no it doesn’t hurt at all” Eric said, already beginning to grow wet in the eyes. He held himself upright, not wanting to scare Jack by moving closer toward him, even if he wanted to. 

 

“Thank you for showing this to me” Jack said. “May I hug you?”

 

Eric did cry then, and came to wracking sobs when Jack pulled them chest to chest. Their warm skin was hot from sternum to thigh, pressed so close that Eric could feel his sobbing breaths pushing back against Jack’s own breathing. 

 

“I understand,” Jack offered, once again acting in a way that Eric could never have anticipated. “I understand completely.”

 

Eric laughed bitterly, “I don’t know if you do.”

 

“I know enough for now.”

 

They climbed into the bath eventually. Eric moved so that he could be apart from Jack by an arm’s span so that he might gather himself and steel his mind for what was to come next. 

 

“I told you this only because of what I dreamed about last night,” he began after a time, when Jack had fully settled under the water, and the warm and softly scented comfort sat entirely in Eric’s bones. “The dream that pushed me from sleep. In it you died. I killed you with my fire.”

 

Jack said nothing at this, only moved forward a bit so as the hear Eric better over the sound of the water shifting in the wide basin. He made no indication of wanting to speak and so Eric continued. 

 

“You and I were, we were sleeping together, and then I began to burn and you did too, and then all that was left were ashes. And then a voice called out to me from the darkness. There was no body, no face that I could see, but a crown amongst shadows. It spoke like a man. It called me  _ ember _ , it called me F _ lame of the South... ” _

 

At this Jack almost jumped forward, his mouth flying open. 

 

“His crown, was it ice and stone, or leaf and branch?” Jack asked breathily.

 

“Ice, it was ice.”

 

Jack nodded, looking no more relieved at hearing this than before. 

 

“In the north the people call him  _ Dratâb.  _ In our folklore he’s the first son of the Northern Wind, a god of visions, and winter, and decay.”

 

Even in the heat of the water Eric felt his skin chill at the idea of  _ Dratâb.  _ He felt again the phantom limb that had ripped the life from his chest. 

 

“He turned me into an  _ Ossa _ .”

 

Jack nodded again at this. 

 

“They are his patron creatures in our myths. Beings of decay as they are, it made sense for the old peoples to attribute them to him.”

 

This surprised Eric, the way Jack seemed to distance himself from this understanding, this belief that his people had for the divine. 

 

“You don’t think so too?”

 

“Yes and no,” Jack said before falling silent. He appeared to mull over his thoughts before finally beginning again. 

 

“I have seen a great many things, some of which I understand, some I do not. I cannot say whether gods walk among us, or come to our dreams, or control our whether. I only know what I know. I only control what I can, and kill those who mean to do me and my people harm.”

 

Eric felt a slant of comfort at this, but not much. It was unnerving, for Jack to offer no true statement of faith, or a lack thereof. 

 

“I promise,” Jack said. “God or no god, you will not become an  _ Ossa _ under my watch. I owe you that much at the very least. After everything so far.”

 

“Thank you, Jack.” Eric didn’t know what exactly for. The entirety of himself, maybe, Eric should have thanked Jack for. 

 

They stayed in the water until their skin grew like prunes do, and until they kissed once, exploratory in a way the others before had not been. Eric couldn’t help but notice the way Jack seemed to be delicate with his touch, as though even so much as a nudge might break the seal and loose something hot and dangerous. Maybe it was respect, but Eric knew it was not a behavior he would be able to handle for long. 


	17. The Sound of War

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Sound the horns of the hunt and war, evil moves in the forests of the north.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello all! A short chapter update for today. As finals week approaches chapter updates will most likely become more sporadic, so fair warning to you all. 
> 
> Again, I would like to thank you for the support you have given this work. It amazes me how excited you all are, I never expected this little experiment to turn out as it has so far. 
> 
> You might have noticed that this work is now going to be part of a series. No spoilers, but I don't think I will be done with these boys for a while yet. 
> 
>  
> 
> Epigraph and chapter title taken from the ever amazing Susanne Sundfor's "The Sound of War"

 

 __Verdict unanimous  
Dawn will turn to dust  
And the snow falls down  
Your footsteps on the ground  
Are lost in the silence

⨁ 

 

When the time came for Jack and Eric to join the others for morning training, their preparations were done with a sense of formal distance that admittedly Eric was thankful for. Jack, though he seemed to have taken the news of the ailment far better than Eric could have ever hoped, showed shifting indications of stress as the morning had continued. He regarded Eric now with a sort of distinct delicacy that was unnerving and challenging to handle for longer than a few moments at a time. It seemed clear that while they may not have been at odds with each other, an uncomfortable air had settled between them that Eric was unsure how to fully address.

 

Part of Eric was okay with this distance, if only because Jack’s hesitation was more akin with the reaction he had expected than what he had actually gotten. Few things unnerved Eric more than when he was surprised, and Jack’s firm and almost argumentative claims that he understood Eric was something he hadn’t anticipated during the countless nights spent worrying about this very situation. As he walked behind Jack toward the training grounds, Eric decided that he would have to speak with Jack again and insist upon clarity between the two. Walking behind him, and seeing the way his shoulders were drawn tight in stress, made Eric wish that they’d continued their conversation rather than the handful or so of halfway-kisses that had slowly descended into awkwardness.

 

⨁  

 

Jack opened the rear door, allowing a rush of cold air to cascade into the corridor, carrying thick clumps of snow with it. In the night a storm front must have blown in from the north. It was thick overheard in a way that blanketed even the Eric’s consciousness with the dense cold of snow. 

 

The men and boys who usually attended training were already deep into practice, the snow stomped down, and at places the hard earth underneath kicked up, mud black against the compressed white. Ransom was missing, from assembly, and uncharacteristically Shitty and Holster were sparring with an intencisty that Eric had not seen before. Chowder and the others were also enraptured in their act, the three boys forming a loose triangle of clashing blades and stomping feet. 

 

They were not alone. Across the still quite snow-laden sparring lawn from the Candorines were men and a women knights in the deep indigo of Zimmermann colors. What exactly was happening was unclear to Eric, even when he saw Lord Robert standing near who might have been the officer of the Zimmermann assembly, turned inward in deep conversation. 

 

Eric turned to Jack with a question but the other began without preamble. 

 

“There has been news of more slanted sightings,” he began, his backed turned to Eric as they  crossed the lawn. “Yesterday my father and his advisors asked that I sit down and plan with them.”

 

Eric felt sudden confusion. Though an increase in slanted numbers was not good, it didn’t explain why Lord Robert, who Eric had been under the impression no longer fought slanted forces, was here now at the Candorine keep with his men in number. 

 

“It’s gotten that bad?”

 

“Yes. Ever since the night with the  _ Ossa _ in the forest, the number of attacks have risen,” Jack sounded grim, and part of Eric wondered why he hadn’t been told this sooner. 

 

“What does that mean, Jack?” Eric asked, not wanting Jack to leave him without offering at least a complete answer. He seemed to want to flee though, moving away from Eric in a mockery of his usual pacing he did when he observed the training of the knight-hopefuls. Finally, when it became apparent that Jack would not stop on his own accord, Eric took his arm in hand and turned him bodily. Shitty, who Eric could see out of his corner vision, seemed to be watching their conversation with a falconer’s keen eye.

 

“My father has asked that you accompany me,” Jack said guiltily, his words tight. “I am to lead the main hunting party, and you are to aid me.”

 

Eric nodded with dawning realization and dread, Jack’s behavior this morning beginning to come into focus. While this might have once surprised Eric, now it seemed obvious in light of what had occurred at the dinner several nights prior. The Zimmermann’s had expressed their relief and gratitude toward Eric. Maybe Robert had known even then he wanted to use Eric as a tool to disperse the slanted from the north. It made sense, in a detached sort of way. To him, Eric was no different than any other knight, even if he happened to hail from a lordling family of the south. 

 

“There isn’t much of a choice, is there?” Eric asked, guessing already the answer he would receive.

 

“No,” Jack said.

 

Eric turned to face the collection of knights with fresher eyes. He saw now that they no longer used the wooden blades, a sign of introductory training, the kind that allowed for more leisure. Cold steel had replaced pine, and the ringing of blade and crossguard echoed in the air with percussive force. It was apparent to Eric now. What little period of winter merriment had ended, a war was coming to the north. 


	18. Double Trouble, Neither Are To Blame

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The tongue can cleave wounds more lasting than the sword.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> A brief update for you all. Happy almost friday (as I write this). This update was supposed to be less angst-ridden, but I followed my own wandering (sometimes its okay, even desirable to be surprised by yourself when you write). 
> 
> Epigraph and title from Susanne Sundfor's "Good Luck, Bad Luck"
> 
> I swear I'm going to end up using her entire discography at the rate I'm going. If you have songs that you think of when you read this, I would love for you to let me know!

_Double trouble, neither are to blame_  
_One wins the round but we will both lose the game_  
_But as he moves closer I cannot help but ask_  
_"If in a different world, would our love forever last?"_

 

⨁

 

Training was grueling on the body and mind, excruciating in the way a person’s movements are when pushed beyond the capacity of joint or ligament, or willingness of the mind. Eric and the others labored for near five days. The Zimmerman knights were incorporated slowly into the ranks of Candorines or, for those who could not or would not be taught the new ways of battle, sent elsewhere to work in the keep until all that were left were those who could handle a blade by the means that the Candorine’s taught. Eric saw Jack less now that he had become consumed by the need of his father’s men, who though weathered in fighting, had not the experience to slay the slanted like the keep’s knights did. Even Eric, green in the horn in age and experience, had the advantage of first-hand accounts garnered by his time in the forest.

 

On what would later prove to be the final day of training, one Zimmermann knight stopped in his movements and laughed in clear jest. Snow fell around him in gathered bundles, bouncing from his rounded stomach which (no doubt was from drinking to excess, if his bodily stench was anything to judge by) bouncing with each of his breathy gasps.

 

“It’s as though we’re to be fighting dragons and other nonsense you’d fine in any _wet-assed southerner’s_ nursery rhyme!”

 

Some of the other men laughed along to this. In their sharp humor Eric could perceive the frustration that must have grown from the continual (and unexpected) process of their relearning. Gone were the stances and positions of traditional sparring and swordsmanship, in place now were proper Candorine ways to dismember the slanted, of which each sub-species must be killed in different, sometimes contradictory ways. The _Ossa_ to flame, the _Wailing_ to frost. It was ironic, really, that these men jested at the south when, to Eric’s understanding, their township was no less than a week’s ride south from here.

 

Another man slapped the back of the first, his beard almost overpowering all other sense of his personality or feature. Eric thought that not much was lost because of this.

 

“Hardly anything could be worse to fight off than the drunkards we keep from raiding _our_ brothels over off Hardington street.”

 

Eric, who had seen more in the last several months than he would have ever expected, knew that these men were weak in mind. No one who had ever looked upon the guts of an _Ossa_ dragging across the snow as it came toward you would ever be so careless in word or action.

 

“If you would spend more time looking up from the bottom of an ale tankard yourself, maybe you’d see the things as they are here,” Eric said kindly, in the tone voice his mother might use on occasion with the Phelps aunts, usually with phrases that aired toward… _blessings_.

 

This seemed to spur the men on, who laughed at Eric’s reply with renewed gusto. They had begun to gather now in the way men tend to, like pigs around a trough waiting for their daily meal to be slopped in front of them. They each turned toward Eric, sizing him up with slow, searching gazes from his thin legs up to where he was thickly bundled even in the heat-raising exertion of sword work.

 

“Ha! I hardly think you know much more than the rest of us lot,” one said. “A squire with a stub of a blade about as long as he is tall.”

 

This brought a row of chuckles from the crowd of aged men that had begun to gather. Candorines and Zimmermanns alike were drawn where the first group stood, a break in activity allowing them the presence of mind to joke and rest their limbs. A few more rude jabs were sent at Eric and his shortness of stature, or whatever crude words simple minds were capable of garnering together into a sentence. He held himself upright, stymied the billowing flames that roiled in his gut, and tempered his tongue for a reply.

 

“ _Lord_ Eric Richard Bittle the Third, of the house Bittle of the Southern pride, wields a baselard of pure Anointed Steel,” Jack said suddenly, wearing the visage the very same he’d worn when Eric had first arrived to the keep so many months ago. It was one of calculated disdain, as though the subject of his gaze lacked any true reason for interrupting his time. “He has cut down a _Black Dog_ which nearly cost me my arm, and turned to ash an _Ossa_ in singular action. Far superior opponents to your stale ale-sloshed cousins clawing after unwanting women.”

 

The Zimmermann men drew back at Jack’s address, and Eric wondered if it was due to the nature of his words, or because of who it was that spoke them. Their expressions soured when they darted attention from Jack to Eric, who slowly realized, just had his heritage ousted publicly in front of the entire assembly, Zimmermann’s and all. For those who had been unaware  or intentionally un-observant had no excuse now for ignorance of his family, and his status among them.

 

Though he stood there in Candorine colors, training among their people, he was a child of the southern orchards, an enemy in any true national, religious, or cultural sense. The Zimmermann township’s proximity to the border only solidified the disdain that grew like weeds between the peoples. And standing before these men as the cousin-child to the king and queen of the south suddenly felt as though he had planted the very seeds of animosity with his own hands.

 

This dawning realization made a quickening sense of displaced shame and regret swell in Eric’s gut, and all the riotous and carefully restrained fire that had strummed within him went out with the sudden evacuation of air that shock provided. He never should have spoken in the first place. He must have grown complacent and comfortable since his mother’s visit. Maybe it was the fault of the way others had reacted. Few of the Candorines he hadn’t know prior to her arrival had so much as looked at him twice (in good humor or bad) after hearing news of his family’s status. These Zimmermann knights, already turned toward bitterness at his words alone, would surely prove to be markedly different in response than their northern neighbors at this revelation. In his unmoored stature he could only look to Jack with an aura of shock no doubt clear on his visage and along every tension-drawn line of his thin frame.

 

Jack would not meet his gaze, turned as he was to the men who had started (and in part, ended) the conversation.

 

“Reprieve is over, back to your places!” Jack called harshly to the crowd.

 

In the rush of bodies returning to their ranks amidst the strewn field, Eric darted toward the keep, fearing that his inexplicably shaken composure might crumble entirely and he would weep in front of these men.

 

He made good distance, covering the trampled ground with a pace shocking in regard to his clearly laughable length of leg. It was as though he flew, and it was not until he was stopped by a weighted hand that it feel like he had truly touched the earth at any point in his flight.

 

Eric charged on, quite nearly yanking the hand and its owner inside the keep with him. He turned and, upon finding that it was Jack who waylaid him, let out the beginnings of a wet cry. He bodily moved Jack from the doorway, shutting the hard frigid pine with a resounding crash that echoed in the stone at their feet. Jack looked at once stricken and defiant, his mouth set hard in a grimace.

 

“Bittle–” he began.

 

“What right had you?” Eric cut him off, knowing that tears had begun to fall from his burning eyes. “Jack. What right had you?”

 

The man seemed more composed than Eric himself. He reached out to touch Eric’s shoulder with a hand, which was rebuffed with considerable force.

 

“I did not think it would be an issue,” Jack offered, a hint of budding apology in his voice. “You’d already sat before most of them with your mother and…”

 

It was as he began to trail off that Eric knew Jack had processed what he’d just done. That he understood now that at the last supper Eric and his mother had not been introduced by name, nor had the Zimmermanns made a show of their presence. Eric realized in retrospection how cleverly tactful his mother had been, dressing out of fashion in Candorine crimson. She’d no doubt looked like the patron of the keep to any who looked to her with blameless ignorance of unfamiliarity, hiding in nearly unadorned sight the southern nobility which she truly was. It had simply been in an effort to mask who they were, with a subtleness that Eric only now was able to see.

 

“No, I suppose you didn’t think.”

 

It felt stupid and reductive for Eric to cry over thing as simple as his identity, and yet he could feel the weight of oncoming tears in a volume that he hadn’t even managed when he spent the late hours with Jack just after the fight with the _Ossa_. Where once Jack had been a voice of comfort, Eric now wanted little sight of him. He couldn’t tell how much of it was because of the thoughtlessness on Jack’s part, or the anger that Eric felt toward his own reactions. Maybe his tumultuous emotions were logical, but Eric was too overwhelmed by the suddenness of this all to express anything more complex than exhausted grief, and anger.

 

“ _Bitty_ , I am sorry” Jack said, and while Eric wanted desperately to feel his genuineness, the bruising was much too fresh to withstand the prods that Jack’s words made at him.

 

Without a reply, Eric walked off toward where he knew he could find solace from the presence of any person of the keep. He didn’t allow himself to fully succumb to his loss of composure until he was shut away in the uninhabited library. Only Jack had ever been here, and not for the first time, Eric was thankful at Jack’s displaced attention.


	19. Because It Wasn’t Really Ever What I Had In Mind

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric seeks solace in the pages of books, and finds that paper is no more forthcoming than the winter wind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> AHH another chapter! I promise after this we will get some more action soon! Much love to you all. 
> 
>  
> 
> Epigraph and chapter title from Susanne Sundfor's "Bedtime Story"

 

_Because I always meant it when I said it would go wrong_  
_Because I always thought my life would be a sad song_  
_The future’s conveyed, you know the chord before it’s played_  
_Oh, what am I but a bad story teller?_  


 

⨁

 

The Bittle’s had begun collecting recipes for far longer than Eric was able to track. Some of the collection was aged to the point of disintegration. The thick parchment paper of the oldest in their care, often in scroll form, could not be touched for fear that they would completely crumble to dust. But there was a sense of pride for the Bittles who, while they had not a large library to boast of, kept their people well-fed. 

 

The book that Suzanne had left behind was one of the middle age books, not so young as to be freshly inked or partially filled, and not so old as to risk losing it to the weathering of time. It had been the first book Eric was allowed to read as a child, when it had become clear that he would not be allowed to grow up the way all the other boys in the Bittle household did. 

 

But Eric had taken this in stride, beginning quite soon in his time with his mother in the kitchen to love what he did. The smell of the book, infused with dusted age and baked scents, brought a comfortable familiarity. This one in particular Eric had nearly memorized, down to the orientation of the pages, which ones were stained with the carelessness of youth, like say a splash on the bottom of the thirtieth page where egg whites had gotten out of nine-year-old Eric’s control.

 

So it was no surprise that, during the time Eric paged through the book in an attempt to stifle his tears, he noticed that something about it was not right. It was hard to tell at first, what truly was different about the book. Something about the weight of the back cover, maybe, or the way it seemed disproportionate to the front. Perhaps it was the texture of the inner cover paper on that back side, artfully painted floral parchment glued over the leather bound woodstock that made up the cover. Once it had lay flush with the supple leather, now the section was almost engorged, as though something had been stuffed underneath the skin without regarding the volume it might take up. 

 

It was a curiosity strong enough to distract Eric from his spatter of tears that still fell. Strong enough too, to prevent him from noticing right away when one of the doors to the library opened on soft hinges and a single set of footsteps entered the space. Eric was about to take a thumbnail, in place of anything else to use, and pry the glue that held the parchment in place. He had just taken the edge of the corner under his force, pulling up to reveal worn paper underneath when a voice startled him from his actions. 

 

“Oh, my apologies Lord Eric. I did not mean to disturb your reading.”

 

Eric looked up to find himself pinned in place by Lady Alicia’s ice-like gaze. Perhaps the chill of it came from the quality of her blue eyes alone. It was hard to tell, though, with both Jack and his mother, how much their gaze’s impression was due to aesthetics alone, or the clarity of their feelings. 

 

“No, you are at no fault, Lady Alicia,” Eric replied, brushing quickly at his face to remove any errant tears that might have been there still. He stood to give her a short bow so that he might draw attention from the opened backing of the cook book, which he realized with shocking suddenness, was the least worrying part of the image. None were supposed to see the book outside the family at all if it could be helped, and here he was dissecting it like some sort of specimen. “I was just leaving, actually.”

 

His flight from the room was halted by a light touch to his shoulder. Lady Alicia turned, and with a softness of countenance that countered her prior expression, motioned back to where Eric had sat. 

 

“Please, stay. I was hoping to talk with you anyways.”

 

It was hard to deny the woman, both because of the candor that her words suggested, and the knowledge Eric had that it was not a common occurrence for a lady of the north to speak with a lord of the south. With care, he returned to the divan he’d been sitting on. Lady Alicia took the seat opposite of him. A minute went by, in which she seemed more than happy to stare silently about the tall room. The evening had drawn on since Eric’s entrance into the space, and deep shadows held firm in the closeness between bookshelves. 

 

“We lived here during most of Jack’s childhood, though he and my husband were often away from home for months at a time,” she began at length. “But when the time allowed, Jack was always in here, lost at times quite literally between the books.”

 

Lady Alicia laughed, the kind that was unadorned by the falsities of courtly women’s laughter in the south. 

 

“One time he’d sought a book from the top shelf of the upper level.” She motioned to where a bannister walkway wrapped around a portion of the upper wall, where the curvature of the long, oval-capped room was most distinct. “He’d managed to climb up there, but not figure out how to come back down. He might have thrown the book to the ground and come down the way he’d climbed, but doing that to a book had never crossed his mind.”

 

Fresh ache rose at the mention of Jack, but also a light and nebulous feeling that Eric couldn’t quite identify. Happiness, maybe, or relief that Jack had lived a childhood not entirely devoted to chasing slanted creatures and sharpening swords. 

 

“My family never had much a taste for book,” Eric replied weakly when she did not continue. 

 

“You seem to have found an interest, nonetheless,” Lady Alicia said in turn, her attention now trained on where the cookbook sat, carefully wedged between Eric’s leg and the back of the divan, partially out of sight. 

 

“Oh, this?” Eric felt the beginnings of a lie well up in him. 

 

“One of your family’s cookbooks, I assumed.”

 

It was in the air before Eric could even finish composing his lie. He was taken aback by the statement, so much so that the room fell into a stilted silence as Alicia waited for a reply. 

 

“If that made you uncomfortable, forgive me. I have just heard on occasion about the Bittle’s and their fondness for secrecy and culinary  _ magic _ .”

 

She said magic in a way that might have suggested it was a sign of some deeper, more mystical craft, and not the reality of what Eric knew it to be, careful measurements of flour, eggs and such honed to preciseness over decades and generations. 

 

“Yes, Lady Alicia. This was a gift from my mother when she visited.”

 

Alicia nodded and, after taking a moment to glance between the book in question and Eric, leaned forward. 

 

“Might I look at it?”

 

Eric pulled back reactionarily, covering the book with both his hands. His instinct was replaced by shame, and the fear that he’d just offended the Zimmermann matriarch. A reedy laugh, however, cropped up from Lady Alicia’s upturned face in response. 

 

“Lord Eric I mean not to make fun of you,” she said between hardly dwindled chuckles. “I simply wanted to understand what all the mystery is about. Clear you have some truly amazing recipes hidden away to warrant such protection.”

 

A hot thick blush came to the entirety of Eric’s body, the kind that felt as though every bit of his blood had turned to molten iron, and was rushing inch by inch along the shell of his skin.

 

“I am deeply sorry for the reaction, it has been ingrained in me since a very young age to protect our family recipes, and  I haven’t had much experience with people...” Eric rambled away, hoping Alicia would hear the genuineness in his voice and forget the rudeness of his actions.  

 

Alicia responded to this too with a laugh, though softer and less from surprise than the first one had been. She looked at Eric with a critical gaze for a moment before standing suddenly. It was not until she had disappeared behind a long and narrow length of shelves that she called back to Eric. 

 

“How about we make a trade? I’ll show you a book that is unique to our family, and you can show me a recipe or two that you don’t mind a foreigner seeing.”

 

Eric considered the cleverness of this, and the way Alicia’s absence prevented him from replying with ease until she returned. When she did come back, the tome in hand struck Eric by the very aura of it. It seemed almost ageless in the way stone walls were, wearing time only in the smoothed corners and shifting color. It could have been as old as the one that Eric held in hand, or twice his age. The black leather that covered it, and the thin gold leafing that marked out indecipherable lettering showed signs of age and wear. 

 

“This,” she said, seating herself directly next to Eric. She cracked the book open with care, keeping her fingers from touching the ink. “This is the book which Jack climbed to the top of the world to get.”

 

Inside was what Eric could only describe as an archive of entries. The text was scrawled in a nestled handwriting in a language that Eric could not read. The words were captured in stark black ink that, contrary to the yellowed pages it was written on, seemed untouched by time. As Alicia progressed slowly through the text, Eric understood only the diagrams that accompanied some of the pages. It seemed to be an anthology of sorts, with wildlife described with diagramed anatomy and careful annotation. It wasn’t until they reached the second of countless sub-sections in the text that Eric realized what he was looking at. 

 

“Is that…” atop the heading of this page was more indecipherable script. The entire page was filled with dense notes, and they spilled unto the side opposite. The flow of words was stopped only when a diagram seemingly walked onto the page, where it had caught Eric’s attention. On the page before him was the anatomical drawing of what could only be a _Black_ _Dog_. The illustration stood on its hind legs, notation of its attributes stemming from the body like branches from a tree, adorned with alphabet leaves. 

 

Eric pushed his family’s book aside and took the other in hand almost without thought. Alicia kept the cookbook closed on her lap where it landed, her attention turned fully to the way that Eric cradled the black leather-bound tome in hand. He wondered how much was in here, and how likely it was that Eric might find a description of what he was somewhere in these pages, if he ever learned how to read the language. 

 

“This is the caudex of the Zimmerman family. Every creature we know in this land is recorded there” Alicia said. “It is the very same book that got my son so enraptured with the slanted. Back when he still thought they were fairytale and legend.”

 

Eric felt a trace of laughter crest at the thought of Jack ever taking the slanted less than entirely serious. 

 

“I have to say that is quite true. Your son hasn’t a sliver of doubt in him”

 

“I know,” Alicia said after a moment. “That is what worries me.” 

 

⨁

 

As Eric had first thought, the caudex was written entirely in the other language he could no disassemble. Though Alicia was forthcoming enough to allow the book to remain in Eric’s care, she would not translate it for him, no matter how thoroughly he bargained. 

 

“Ask Jack if you must, what is in there is of little interest to me.”

 

Eric could tell, from the way she seemed to regard the book with marked unease, that she did not decline from pure lack of interest alone. It left Eric with little real options though, and after half an hour of internal debate, neither side really winning, Eric left the library in search of Jack.

 

Luck was with him in a way it had obviously not been before. He found Jack upon his first try, the other closed away in his room. A soft knock was all it took for the door to swing suddenly open, revealing Jack with an expression that could only be described as hopeful. 

 

“ _ Bitty, _ ” he said, but did not move to usher Eric into the room. 

 

Eric replied by lifting the caudex into Jack’s field of view, and when the confusion on his face did nothing to move him from the doorway, Eric pushed lightly on his chest and together walked them into Jack’s room. 

 

“Bitty, why do you have that?” Jack asked. Their prior argument was lost for the moment in the wake of Eric standing there with the Zimmermann tome. Leaving the argument unaddressed for now was something he was sure they were both thankful for, but would come to regret later. 

 

“I need you to look through this for me,” Eric began haste, walking toward the desk which he knew Jack tried to keep as meticulously organized as he could during times when it was not in use. He placed the Caudex open to the first entry, and motioned toward it. “ _ Jack, _ please do this for me.”

 

“I do not understand, where were you able to get that?”

 

“Your mother.”

 

Eric kept his hand pointed toward the opened tome until Jack relented and, with a heavy sigh, sat in the high back chair before the desk. He looked down at the page. 

 

“ _ Arctic Howler.” _

 

Eric flipped the page.

 

A sigh, “Arctic fox.”

 

Eric continued for several tens of pages, each no more or less helpful in finding who or what Eric was. As they went Jack’s confusion and annoyance grew in turn with Eric’s frustration until they both reached a fevered pitch. 

 

“Next entry,” Eric all but droned as they continued on, moving forward with what must have been the c’s. 

 

“ _ Cercarrin Boar– _ Bittle, I don’t see why we are doing this.”

 

“Next entry.”

 

Eric flipped over the page, a rising chorus of fire turning over under his skin as his anxieties and impatience continued to swell.

 

“Bittle.”

 

“Next entry,  _ please _ .”

 

Jack crossed his arms and pushed back from the desk.

 

“No, not until you tell me what is going on–”

 

“Read the damned page,  _ Jack _ !” Eric shouted, slamming his palms onto the table in front of him. He felt he immediate welling of tears hot and wet fall from his eyes, and he knew that he was perilously close to losing what composure had left. Jack suddenly heaved him back from the table, revealing handprints that Eric had begun to burn into the varnish of the desk’s pine surface. Only then was Eric made aware of his hands on fire. 

 

“Eric, what in all hells is going on?” Jack cried. He’d never lost control like this before, the fire quickly eating away at the cuffs of his shirt sleeves. Smoke trailed up and Eric felt himself enter a terrific panic. Jack took his face in hand and stared directly into his eyes.

 

“Eric, breathe.”

 

Moments passed horribly slowly, lethargic and heavy with the loss of control of Eric own emotions. It was not until he came back to his senses that Jack released his face and, taking his arms in each of his large hands, embraced him softly. His arms entirely wrapped Eric’s slight frame, pressing his newly heated forearms flush with his ribcage. 

 

“Why can I not get what I want for once?” The tears had come in force and words barely penetrated them. “I just... I just want to know what I am.”

 

The confusion and anger that had ridden across Jack’s frame for the entirety of their time at the desk fell from his suddenly as the clarity of Eric’s words hit him. He leaned back, tension across his back for perhaps another reason now.

 

“What? Bitty, what are you talking about?”

 

Eric couldn’t help but let out a wet and horribly sharp laugh at this. How could this man be so dense. 

 

“I’m one of  _ them _ , Jack. I have to be.” He motioned to the table, “Look what I did… Jack I just want to know what I am and I had hoped that something like.... Like  _ me _ would be in there somewhere.”

 

The only sound in the room was Eric’s labored breathing and the sharp crack of a fire burning forgotten in the hearth. It was ironic, almost, that it took up as much space as Eric did, simply a source of heat and a bed used up ember. 

 

“Bitty,” Jack said slowly. Eric couldn’t bring himself to look up, partially trapped as he was still in Jack’s grasp. “Bitty, you won’t find what you are looking for in there.”

 

This was enough for Eric to look up, and before he was able to spit a tart reply from between his quivering lips, Jack continued. 

 

“I have read that book more times than I can count, and I have never found anything,  _ anything _ , like you in there.”

 

Disappointment and conjoined relief hit Eric like a physical blow. Suddenly everything, the shouting and setting Jack’s desk on fire had been for nothing. Once again Eric was left unmoored and unsure who or what he was more than an unfortunate boy from a southern family too well-bred for him. And yet, there was a hair’s breadth of a chance that, if he wasn’t in the collection of slanted things, he wasn't some monster. 

 

A soft pressure caressed Eric’s forehead. Jack leaned back from the kiss, an uneasy smile on his face. 

 

“You may well be singular in your uniqueness, Eric Bittle,” he murmured. Eric allowed himself to be kissed once more, softly. Only to hold off the ache that sat leaden against his heart. 


	20. Dark Come Soon

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Eric and Jack are woken to their most serious threat yet.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hello everyone! My deepest apologies for making you wait so long between updates. I hope the longer length of this chapter helps to make up for it. As my finals are coming to an end (I have a single exam left) I hope to be able to finish this story sometime before the end of December!
> 
> I can't express how thankful I am for all the kind comments and support! You all are truly central to the continuation of this story, your words of support are honestly fuel to my fire (some pun intended?)
> 
> As usual, I have borrowed the title and epigraph from a song in this fic's playlist. (you can find it on spotify by searching the fic's title).  
> Song this time is "Dark Come Soon" by Tegan and Sara.

_Dark, you can't come soon enough for me_  
_Saved from one more day of misery_  
_Everything I love, get back from me now_  
_Everyone I love, I need you now_

⨁ 

 

Evening came upon the keep quickly, as it was want to do following the short daylight hours of late winter. They ate a delayed meal in Jack’s chambers, largely without conversation. Silence stretched between them for near an hour, and in it Eric realized that without his prompting Jack could very well go without words forever.

 

At some point Jack bundled the things from supper away and, after disappearing from the room for a stretch of time, returned again with a marked drowsiness. When it seemed clear that Jack meant to ready for sleep, Eric stood and gathered himself.

 

“Eric,” Jack said, the first real words either had spoken to the other in a startlingly long stretch of time. His voice was hoarse, worried almost more than his bottom lip was between careless teeth. 

“I want you to know that I am deeply sorry for revealing you to my father’s men. I never meant to do that to you.”

 

What little strength that Eric had regained from his prior break quickly deserted him and, lacking enough ambition to leave outright, he sat down at the foot of Jack’s bed. 

 

“I am still angry with you,” he replied with careful words, knowing that is he misspoke now it could allow for Jack to misunderstand his actions. “But I am far too tired to address that issue right now.”

 

the events of the day were a gross weariness that pulled at the edges of Eric’s composure. He slouched against the footer of the bed, the blunt edges of the wood pressing in a dull pain that was needed for Eric to keep himself focused. 

 

“I understand that. I was wondering if you would like to remain in here for the evening?” Jack asked, and the trepidation in his voice, and the way his broad shoulders seemed to cave inward, cracked something in Eric. When had he found this man so charming, and why now did it offer itself up as such a willingness to comply to whatever Jack asked. 

 

After worrying a reply over and over Eric spoke, standing to adjust his shirt. 

 

“Yes, I will stay. Dealing with what you’ve done can be a task for tomorrow’s Eric” he said, stepping toward the adjoined lavatory so that he might ready for sleep as quickly as possible. 

 

When he finally was allowed to give into the heaviness of his eyelids, Eric sighed deeply and with feeling. Carefully, so as not to disrupt the tenuousness that was between Jack and himself like a scab over a healing wound, he tucked into Jack’s bed. Eric pulled the downy duvet nearly over his head. The bed’s unneeded width was now a blessing, as Eric could keep himself apart from Jack, though the look on the other’s face, and his own limbs begged him to cross the few brief spans between their bodies. Nevertheless he persisted, and before long he was soundly asleep. 

 

⨁ 

 

Eric knew the moment his eyes opened that he was not truly awake. Snow fell skywards from the small clearing where he stood, joining a thick and churning bed of thunderheads. Like heartbeats, they released violent, purple-edged lightning across the sky in ripples that could be felt against the skin. The snow thunder came almost immediately after each blow, deafening and bone rattling. It was in part because of this that Eric missed the first of the stranger’s words. 

 

“ _ Flame of the South _ , why do you linger still?” the voice spoke, a sound not unlike the groaning of ice atop a lake. A storm of crows screamed from over head, black spots of ink against the ash-grey sky.  Eric turned to watch their flight and, seeing  _ Dratâb  _ appear suddenly from within the low hanging boughs beside him, petrified where he stood. The spectre had a physical presence, moving the air and draining from Eric what little heat still remained. The snow, which fell upward, pooled in eddy currents about  _ Dratâb _ . 

 

“Your warning has been given. When the people of the north fall before my approach, you will not be spared.”

 

Ever ligament, muscle, and nerve in Eric’s thin body cried out to flee, yet his feet were anchored by terror and a growing weight that could not have been from his emotions alone. He felt the fire, rooted in his bones, begin to draw out into the narrow air between them. 

 

Then, as though Eric had misrecognized the very nature of the forest,  _ Dratâb  _ was a  _ heartwood _ . Wicked and near black against the thundering night, it reached out for Eric. He cried, once, twice, his voice clipped by a wavering wind. The branches took apart his skin, opened him like a flayed beast after the hunt. A single branch entered his heart and all light was lost. 

 

⨁

 

Eric woke unable to move, soaked through in his own sweat. He smelled of panic and the dirt of unwashed bodies. He lay there, unable to speak or shift about until his heart slowed and the panic, though it remained, allowed his muscles to move. In the imperceptible dark between night and early morning he remained awake, unable to close his eyes without the voice of  _ Dratâb,  _ echoing in dead voices. Eric pushed himself underneath Jack’s outspread arm and, willing peace upon his heart, waited for the sun to rise. 

 

⨁ 

 

Eric was woken in the morning by a panicked and screaming Shitty. He entered the room suddenly and without warning, the thick door slamming resoundingly against the stone wall. Jack was the first to wake, startled from his place next to Eric’s tightly curled body. Shitty spoke in hardly contained tones, his voice frayed with panic.

 

“Jack, you must wake  _ now _ !” he said, moving across the room and shaking an already woken Jack into motion. Eric, who woke at the mattress tossing violently, was stricken not by Shitty’s violent waking, but that Eric had even managed to return to sleep in the first place. He took a brief moment of  stunned silence to be thankful that the duvet managed to hide his small frame underneath it. 

 

Shitty near shouted “It’s Bitty, he’s gone missing!”

 

Shitty’s worry would have been charming at any other occurrence, but here it fell on Eric like a weighted guilt. Something must have happened in the night, for a panic to arise of Eric’s absence from his own bed. 

 

“Euh, I don’t think Eric is–” Jack attempted to calm the frantic knight, who was nearly crawling into bed with them. 

 

Eric, far too exhausted, decided that he’d rather be responsible for his own reveal. He sat up without a word. Shitty released a panicked yelp as the duvet on Jack’s other side shifted suddenly. Then, when he saw who it was that rose from the covers, his face dropped all but the slightest ghost of worry, and a vulpine smile creeped thoroughly under his heavy mustache.

 

“So our own Chevalier has been sleeping with the enemy, I see” he mouthed saucily at the pair, making horridly wet noises as he leaned forward to press unwanted kisses to Jack’s forehead. Eric held him back with a look he could only call unrelenting ice. Jack, maybe as short of temper as Eric was himself, pushed Shitty off with a shout over onto the covers with a shout. 

“Shitty! Why are you here?”

 

This seemed to be enough to extinguish the humorous energy which had overtaken Shitty. He returned immediately to the somber, terrified version of himself. A transformation done in the span between blinks.

 

“Several homes in Samwell proper were attacked during the night, your father is readying men to search the area.”

 

As though lit aflame, Jack leaped from the bed without a word. He pulled a shirt on, one he’d worn the day prior, and all but dispersed into smoke as he fled the room. The breath froze up in Eric’s chest, in part due to new anxiousness, and the memory of his own nightmare. It was the kind of unease that spit out sparks of worry like a wildfire. A burning, rapidly cyclical series of  thoughts spit out like cracking embers. 

 

“Shitty, what’s happened?” he asked as they followed Jack out the door. The other was already gone, no sign of the way he’d run after entering the main corridor. No doubt he’d gone off in search for his father, or else, in search of his things to ready for a fight. 

 

“We have little idea. A few men were sent out nearly a quarter hour ago to scout. It started when a woman and a young child pounded on the doors to the keep, their feet were bloodied to hell. They must have ran barefoot or something likewise. There were deep wounds all over the woman’s arms and more blood on the child, something truly nasty must have attacked them,” Shitty uttered this with the breathlessness of someone who tried to say as much at once in fear of forgetting some minute detail. “When they were found the woman wouldn’t stop screaming that something had attack their homes.The woman fell unconscious shortly after, she has been in weak constitution ever since.”

 

They joined the others in the main hall. The woman was nowhere to be seen, most likely ferried somewhere hidden to recover. In the middle of the floor was a thin sheet over a small shape, the dark stains of blood seeping through the weave of the fabric. Eric could almost taste the bitterness of it on his tongue. 

 

The doubt in Eric’s mind was not from whether or not he would be going with the men sent to look at the homes that were attacked. Though there was still little indication of the what had attacked the people, man or slanted, he was the best ward against an  _ Ossa _ . It would be foolish to depart without him.  

 

His doubt, however, was from the fate he’d find in the woods. He saw atop his vision, like a pane of stained glass, the blankness of  _ Dratâb,  _ and the omen that had been given him clear as daylight. But even if he felt hardly prepared for it, Eric would go if only the ensure the safety of Jack and his father. He only hoped that whatever thing responsible for the attack on a Samwell was as terrified of Eric’s fire as he was. 

 

⨁ 

 

The eight men sent are not given the luxury of riding horseback. Jack and his father did not feel comfortable riding into a situation unknowing of what they might find. It was in an effort to move more silently, or as Shitty offered ‘not charge in atop tasty blood sacks’. 

 

The scouts had not returned, and after waiting a hair’s breadth more the small group of men finally departed. It was nearly an hour before the group arrived at the northeastern outskirts of Samwell, the area where Jack thought the attack might have occured. Some of the townspeople in the area gathered together in the streets, warmed by mugs of slowly steaming liquids, and bundled under thick woolen blankets in haphazard patterns. Eric wondered why they were not more concerned with whatever it was that had attacked. Maybe it was simply a fact of the environment. This could very well be exciting for them.

 

Jack and his father walked ahead of the main group of men, wandering along the mostly-unoccupied cobbled streets until they came upon a section of homes set apart from the rest by a noticeably large run of young, leafless birch trees.  In the front stood the remains of two houses. The first might have once been a single story, built of hardy wood support beams and once roofed with the same pine tiles that adorned the other houses nearby. Something had crippled the front of the house. Lacking several supports, the remainder of the house slumped over weakly, nearly succumbing to its own weight.

 

The second house was destroyed in a much more thorough way. What had occured first Eric could hardly tell. All that was left of the original structure slowly burned to the ground, save the stone and clay chimney which rose from the burning mess like a ship’s mast Eric had often seen as a young child, waiting to be adorned with cloth and set to the sea. 

 

“What could have done this?” Eric asked Shitty. 

 

They waited for Jack and Lord Robert to proceed. After speaking quickly, they sent two men further down the street to check the other houses, motioning the rest to remain. Jack passed between the two homes, looking about for tracks or some sense of what had occured. Hopefully what he sought was not yet obscured by the snow which had begun to fall earlier that morning. Eric looked down and tried not to imagine the dream.

 

“Unfortunately, Bitty, there are half a dozen things that could have done this,” Shitty replied. 

 

A scream, followed by a panicked holler, pierced the morning air. The scream was a human cry. It echoed out from somewhere further down the street, where the birch area thickened before leading away from Samwell proper. The cry resounded again after a moment, this time piercing the air with horrifying shrillness, as though it tore through the flesh of the throat as it exited the body. To Eric it sounded as though it came from only a few homes away.

 

As Jack and his father led the men quickly through the snow, Eric turned back the way they’d come. He stopped as in the distance townspeople shut themselves inside their homes, closing thick shutters over their windows, and baring their doors. After seeing the house which had been shorn open like a parcel of paper, he doubted what little defense a few extra spans of wood could bring. 

 

They arrived to where the sound might have come from, joining the two men that had been sent ahead. The houses looked unharmed as they stood beside the prior two, and for a moment Eric wondered where truly the sound had come from, if not from here. 

Eric notice too late that the front door was not closed, but rather the shadows inside mimicked the solidness of black pine. In fact, the door seemed to have been torn from the hinge, missing entirely.

 

From inside the same scream echoed out for a third time, harsh and ended as abruptly as it had started. Then, with the sound of breaking glass, a creature crashed from an upper window down to the ground in front of the house. It was entirely white, save for blood that splattered its forearms, and ran slowly from its chin down the beginning of its unclothed chest. The creature turned toward the men and, from a maw the same bloodied crimson as its limbs, it released a single long, wavering call. The call erased all sound, and only the remnants of its echoes filled the air for several abhorrent seconds. 

 

Slowly its gaze rose to Eric, who felt the heat outright leave his body. The eyes of the creature were the same depthless and vacant expanse he had seen only once prior, set now in the face of a man who couldn’t have been much older than Jack. There was nothing inside that might have signified deeper intelligence, and yet the once-man rose up on its hind legs and began to amble slowly toward Eric with clear intention. Then, breaking its a languid airs, it leaped forward. Eric watched as the  _ Ossa _ launched forward with wicked speed, bearing down two sickeningly human hands. Horror was overcome by dread as Jack and Lord Robert stepped in the thing’s path.

 

The  _ Ossa _ was upon them a fraction of a moment. Jack held it back with a striking blow, catching the creature with a wide arcing slash across its chest and side. Robert joined in turn, swinging his own blade with a wavering accuracy, swordsmanship tarnished by age and having been caught unprepared.

 

Eric wanted to move to Jack’s side immediately. As much as the air soured in his mouth, he knew that fire would be needed before the beast, as human as it might once have been, was laid to rest. Eric was waylaid, however, when a chorus of screams resounded from behind. Dashing from the birch came a poorly clothed child. They rushed from the under the low-hanging limbs, long black hair stark against the dead pallor of their skin and the once white color of their bedclothes. Relief quelled up, the thought of finding at least one survivor of the attack. Then with a sudden inhuman scream the child flung itself into the air. It swung out with what Eric realized was its only attached arm and latched hold of one of the men.

 

Turmoil erupted. The man screamed as the  _ Ossa _ child bore into his exposed flesh. The sound of skin tearing as the man lost his throat to the child sparked newly hot terror into Eric’s very blood. The  _ Ossa _ that Eric had encountered before had never been able to move so quickly. With a shout a Zimmermann knight brought his sword down on the child, cleaving deep into the side of its thin body.

 

Shitty shouted a string of curses as, with a celerity that astounded Eric, two more smaller children scuttled from the underbrush. Eric knew what had happened. The families had been killed and, in the intervening hours between their death and the arrival of Eric and the others to the house, had succumbed to whatever virulent curse which turned the dead into  _ Ossa _ . 

 

One of the small things lunged for Shitty, who cried out and swung his sword sloppily at the creature. Eric had no doubt that Shitty had never seen something of this nature before, as he was nearly incapable of steading his strikss. The sword blade, though wielded by panic alone it seemed, caught the little  _ Ossa _ in the face, sticking wettly in the soft part between upper and lower jaw. 

 

“Fucked by the Gods!” Shitty cried, attempting to yank his blade from the little creature’s face. Eric ripped his leather gloves from his hand and, without waiting for the doubt to catch up to him, jammed his now flaming fingertips into the exposed flesh at the side of the  _ Ossa _ boy’s head. It caught like a lightning strike to dried grass, and with a horrible scream the thing fell under Shitty’s blade and began to writhe on the ground. 

 

Beside them, lost in the fray, the larger child  _ Ossa _ was hewn down. Missing both legs and the other arm, it thrashed violently in the muddied snow. Black blood sprayed from the withering form, and a haunting series of screams echoed forth from its mouth before a knight brought his short spear’s butt down, crushing the throat. 

 

Eric moved to ignite the dismembered  _ Ossa _ when a thunderous roar echoed from a great distance. The second young creature fled then, leaving behind the limbless one to its trashing, and the one which Jack and his father had somehow pushed back. Eric let his hands extinguish as one of the men lit a branch from the burning corpse of the first and made quick work lighting the others. Their bodies snapped viciously as they burned, the dead flesh and fat bubbling away. 

 

“We are not in numbers for this,” Jack said to the few men remaining. “Turn back to the keep, tell every home you pass to light a fire and stay indoors.” 

 

Eric was about to speak when Lord Robert continued after his son. 

 

“It is too dangerous to move the townspeople now, not until we know what numbers we are dealing with. Quickly, men. To the keep.”

 

With the unease due to what had just occurred, Eric donned his gloves and set off down the way they came. His entire body shook with unspent energy. Unspoken was the reality the reality that now, after what they had seen, nowhere felt truly safe 


	21. Among Us

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> The Ossa wage a tireless fight (as only dead things are able to).

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow! Time seems to melt during the holiday season. I apologize in advance for the chaos of this update, writing action is not my strong suit (you might wonder, then, what is). I've been struggling with what this story is doing. I hope to move the plot further in the next update! 
> 
> As always, the title and epigraph taken from Susanne Sundfor, this time her song "Among Us".

There is a killer among us  
Looking for kisses, looking for jaws  
He is a desperate soul  
He collects hearts in jars

He craves the heavens  
He covets hell  
He dumps his bodies into a wishing well

Ooh, save me from his menace  
Ooh, save me from his menace

What he does is a venial sin  
He is a god within

Ooh, save me from his menace  
Ooh, save me from his menace

He peeled off every vein I had 'til there was nothing left  
But a bloodless heart  
Still beating for him

⨁

 

They ran. It was hard to feel any sort of heroism while fleeing as fast as one could, but for Eric being alive seemed the better option. He’d already seen a ‘heroic death’ today. There was nothing all the more favorable from a dead man without a neck’s worth of flesh. Before fleeing Eric had lit the man’s corpse on fire, in a moment when no one was nearby. He knew the true nature of fearing the dead. The next time anyone saw the man, he would be on the other side of the fight. So Eric had burned the body. After he’d pulled his leather gloves back on, and joined the others as they made a quick pace down the long path that would lead them back to the keep, pushing the smell of burning flesh from his mind.

 

Eric was thankful that the Candorines chose sparser armor and thick leathers over any alternative. It made the near continuous dashing run they now took far more weatherable. If he had been weighed down by thirty extra pounds of steel, on top of the blizzard which seemed to grow from the north without warning, he’d be dead by now. As things were Eric could keep pace with Shitty at least, better than the older men in thicker plates of Zimmermann armor could. 

 

The snow had come upon them faster than they could have guessed. The light dusting from the morning had grown swollen at some point in their retreat.  What could only be described as a thunderhead of clouds moved down on northwesterly winds, draw tall and wrathful overhead. Snow blanketed everything in another downy layer. Eric was thoroughly wet from it and his own exertion. 

 

Blessedly, the first rising sights of the keep appeared just through the shrouded air. Relief was a shortly lived thing. With a cry that was now far too familiar for Eric, a form shifted through the pine boughs, cascading snow down the evergreens. Jack cried for the men to continue, but another far louder cry from the forest drowned out his words. With renewed vigor Eric charged onward. In his chest was a feral kind of fire, a kind that carved out his lungs and up his throat, choking the air from him with shocking strength. The entirety of his body burned for one reason or another, and above all, pure and unrelenting terror. 

 

Eric was thrown to the ground with a sudden violence that sent his head crashing to the frozen surface of the cobbled road. A deafening roar sounded overhead, erasing all thought and sound. Eric felt terrific bile rise in his chest, but if he relented to it there would be no surviving what was to come. He elbowed back at the body that crushed him to the earth, and when it shifted from the jab, he rolled out and away. His baselard was trapped under him as he shifted in the snow, trying to get distance from whatever had knocked him down. 

 

It was then that he saw Shitty, equally covered in snow, crawling after Eric with clear panic stark in the wildness of his eyes and hair. 

 

“Bitty!” he cried as he pulled himself to his feet and, with a strength Eric did not know he possessed, ripped Eric upwards. “We need to depart!”

 

To the right of the road a creature Eric had never seen before rose from a crouch. It was turned with its back to them, several pine boughs cleaved from under the wide sweep of its horns. Eric saw the earth it had tore up where Eric would have been had he continued along his path. The creature’s large, plate-like horns stretched wider than Eric was tall, and in them were draped what looked to be dead, dried flesh. It had killed something with those protrusions, and what was left had turned to moulder in the cold. 

 

On the other side of the creature, what seemed like an impossible distance, stood Jack, his sword drawn and held rigid in hand. Their eyes met for only a fraction, long enough for Eric to see the tremor of fear that gripped Jack like a living thing. Then Eric was jolted from behind. 

 

“Fuck’s sake, Bitty, flee!” Shitty hollered, shoving Eric into motion. He hauled them off the road entirely, dashing crazed into the very same trees from which the creature must have come. There the pine and leafless oaks were thinned by the aged remains of the original Candorine castle, which rose plinth-like from the white earth, or lay dusted with snow in long reams of upended blocks of stone. 

 

They ran. The sound of fighting broke out intermittently, from the road or somewhere further away. Twice Eric almost turned back, knowing that Jack and the others might still be there, fighting for their lives while Shitty and Eric fled. 

 

“No” Shitty had said the second time, grabbing Eric in his lanky arms and turning him bodily away. “Jack wanted us to run, we’re running.”

 

Eric had relented, only because as much as he wanted to be sure that Jack was alright, he had no interest in finding one of the  _ Ossa _ alone in the woods. 

 

They were alone for a span of time, Eric unsure of exactly how long. They moved with dwindling pace, weariness coming down upon them both. It had been an early rise, and two sprinting dashes. The crest of the keep’s towers could be seen now through the trees, they would be there within minutes. Eric was lulled into a sense of tentative relief, nothing moved in the white-dipped wilds but the two of them. 

Another hundred paces or so passed before the sound of breaking branches struck from the depth of the forest to their right. Eric stopped and, drawing his baselard, scanned the brush. Shitty turned to look at him, fear in his eyes, it seemed clear that he wished to continue. The cracking grew loud enough to be heard with startling clarity over their ragged breaths. 

 

“It’s too close, I would rather fight it on my own terms” Eric said, even while his hands shook violently. He could hardly keep the blade steady. The cold did nothing to help, leeching his heat from the dampness of his clothes and from his exposed face. Snow fell less-thoroughly here, where they were blanketed by a canopy of branches that partly kept back the falling frost. It made the visibility better, but only just. He still could not see where the sound was coming from, nor what was making it. 

 

Shitty said nothing for once as he pulled his own blade and began to scan the trees around them. The echo of the forest bounced sounds back and forth by slants and degrees. They were in the middle of it, a web of sound that had them pinned in place. Then the illusion broke as only seemed fitting, with the explosion of countless tree boughs flying from their parent bodies.

 

When Eric finally saw what was coming toward them, he nearly fell over at the sight alone. It appeared to move slower than even the first  _ Ossa _ did. But there was an efficiency to its movement that made the entire process deceiving, long legs carrying it surely over snow, fallen tree, and rubble. Perhaps in another life the creature had once been a simple wild bear, but no longer. Even from a distance Eric could see the lightlessness of its eyes. At least ten feet of rotting flesh bore down on them, from a distance that made the blood in Eric’s veins stop. 

 

“Run,” Eric said as he shoved his blade back into its sheath and began to fly across the ground, his leather boots striking crunching steps in the snow.. 

 

He and Shitty darted through the trees with an energy that hadn’t been there mere seconds before. Despair was a potent feeling, spurning weariness and pouring strength into limbs that had once been willowy and weak. Behind a thundering roar sounded from the bear  _ Ossa _ and the sound of crashing branches intensified. An indescribable tearing came, followed by a tremendous smash that shook the very earth and almost knocked Eric from his feet in the middle of his stride. He turned in time to see the creature bound over a pine tree it had knocked over as though it were nothing but a stalk of tall grass. The boughs still bounced from the collision against the frozen earth.

 

Blind fear was perhaps a far stronger feeling than despair. It overpowered sight itself, and reason too was hewn back by it. Eric screamed. For the first time in a long time, Eric let forth a peel of sheer terror. Shitty turned at the sound, his feet carrying him still, and saw what Eric had witness. His cry of shock was no less emotional, and together, screaming as though in an effort to shout down the very sky, they fled from the bear. 

 

In the distance, the keep’s outer tower walls grew tall against a grey sky. There the stone would hold off even the bear’s onslaught, perhaps. That was, if they could make it there. Now that panic had come at least three times upon his body, Eric could feel the genuinely real weight of exertion. His chest ached desperately for him to slow even as his terror urged him on, and what little he could feel of his legs was pain, his feet had long gone numb. 

 

But there would be no stopping if he wanted to live. The strides of the bear could be heard, keeping an impossibly even rhythm. It was gaining ground, bursting through tree limbs or outright toppling entire growths over when they were in the way. 

 

The ground dissolved and time seemed to bleed away in their flight. Air rushed hot and fast in Eric’s burning chest and, with a cry of relief and continued pain he and Shitty crossed the threshold of the forest and out onto the clearing which opened up onto the front of the keep. 

 

Eric had thought he knew the meaning of chaos, but what they found was something else entirely. The main doors of the keep were hewn back, broken outwards as though assaulted from the inside. Along the tower’s wall windows had been destroyed, some dripping long reams of blood, black or red seemingly at random. In the clearing, Ransom, Holster, and countless others fought off a worryingly large group of slanted  _ Ossa.  _ From the roadway, Jack and father’s men were still retreating, pursued by the massively tall, horned creature. And the bear came charging from behind, taking a tree down with it. 

 

The tree fell almost silently in the sudden violent thundering that the clearing battle provided. Eric moved to escape its path, but surprise and weariness overpowered reflex and with a sickening premonition he saw the moment when the branches of the tree’s peak came down on him and pinned him to the frozen earth. 

 

Pain lanced up and down Eric’s body, from where the collision had knocked the wind from his lungs, to the places where the branches pinned him down. Pine needles attacked the softness of his exposed face and Eric could only release a cry of panic as his mind returned to him after the shock. Distantly he could hear Shitty cry out, but all sense of language was lost for Eric as the bear stepped purposefully over the downed tree and toward where he writhed under the branches. There was no reaching for his blade, it was pinned, like his arms, under branch and bough. Fire, Eric knew, would take to the wet, cold tree limb like a sodden towel. And would that be a gambit Eric could even survive?

 

His fire though, as it had done before when he could not think, took over his limbs. With an explosive force he shoved with his feet against any purchase he could find. It did little for him, but shove a cold run of snow up the back of his shirt. Eric tried again, kicking out at the branches below his feet. He slid a handful of inches, enough that Eric’s right arm was suddenly freed. The bear bore down on his position, a maw of pure emptiness opening for Eric to look within. Without thought Eric raised his hand and, after a second, showed the bear a beacon of living flames. 

 

They ate through the leather gloves with effort, unfurling hot and red, spitting sparks and trailing black smoke. The bear reared back, roaring in what might have been fear or rage. Eric, his hand held aloft, kicked again at new branches, pushing himself further back from the  _ Ossa _ and out another few inches from the tree. His lungs ached, and for the first time his own fire seemed to tax the limb which it grew from. Like a flower it had unfurled, spreading into the sky, and the pain it caused grew with each inch it rose upwards. Even as a pillar now, Eric could barely see from the pain that coursed up his limb, tearing through the muscle, a pain that could be felt in the bone. The bear roared again, and then turned to swing at something overhead.

 

“By the Gods!” he heard Shitty cry. 

 

“Shitty, run!” Eric hollered, waving his arm as much as he could with the strength he had left. The fire ate down the length of his sleeve, and stretched a foot or more beyond the tip of his longest finger. It was the most he’d ever seen, and it felt as though it were killing him. But better Eric, than for Shitty to die trying to save him. 

 

“No way are you dying and leaving me to deal with Jacques alone,” Shitty said, and a line of thoroughly debauching swears followed, percussed by intermittent blows traded between sword blade and the bear’s clawed swing. “By  _ Klimera _ this thing is a bastard.”

 

Eric felt the fire begin to run its course. There was little left for it to eat away, save the remainder of Eric’s cloak and coat. His arm fell limp to the side, but he continued to kick out, hoping that he’d soon be free. 

 

Unexpectedly, the  _ ossa _ , and Shitty, and Eric himself, a wickedly long spear lanced out from behind the boys and embedded itself into the throat of the bear. Rage echoed out of the creature with stunning strength. It was overpowered by a what could only be described as a war cry as, with a jarring tug, the spear left from the throat and reentered the body through the mouth. Lardo, her voice cracking, cried again as the bear ripped its head back, jolting the spear in her grip. 

 

“Pull Bitty out” she said, fighting to keep her grip on the length of pine. It would make sense that Shitty was as immobilized by shock as Eric was, as it took another rousing from Lardo to get him into motion. He grabbed at Eric’s arms and, without heeding the exposed limb, or what was left, he ripped Eric from the tree’s grasp. 

 

Lardo was losing the fight with the bear. It brought a single weighted paw down upon the spear shaft and snapped it as though it were kindling. The point and the rest of the shaft dangled from where Lardo had embedded it in the meat of the creature’s shoulder. The injuries did nothing to halt the creature as it moved again to attack them. 

 

It was rage and exhaustion which propelled Eric forward. He drew his baselard forth with his left hand, and brought it up against the bear. All of the power of the bear’s swing earned the severing that occurred as, with no small amount of luckm the blow hit by angles of correctness and lobbed the creature’s paw clean from the limb. Eric faltered under the strike, the force still enough to knock him back even as the paw fell and released a torrent of black blood from the end of the stump. 

 

Eric didn’t anticipate the blow that would come to follow, and the bear caught him across the side with the back of its remaining forepaw. He wheeled through the air, landing without breath on an uneven surface. Shitty, who had bore the weight of the collision, groan from underneath. 

 

“Boys we need to go,  _ now _ !” Lardo screamed, hauling a still breathless Eric to his feet, and then Shitty to follow. Together she led them through the embattled clearing, making quick strides to the keep and the shadows of its interior. 

 

As they passed by, Eric could see the true nature of the fight. It was clear that they were losing. An unconscious Holster was supported by an arm over Ransom’s shoulder and was being dragged back to the keep. The trio of boys, primarily Dex, fought back a group of  _ ossa _ in bodies Eric could not identify from the retreating pair. Jack was not out in the open in any place that Eric could see. His father, however, could be spotted moving steadily across the clearing, his remaining men fighting what they could, or running around what they could not. Those they passed joined them, making for the safety of the keep. 

 

Eric lost sight of this as, with no amount of delicacy, Lardo yanked him into Faber hall. The interior was chaos too. Black blood was pooled on the stone floor, and what appeared to be a severed limb was left unattended in the middle of the pool. Inside, the walls showed signs of being battered by something with thin, blunt instruments. The sky light above was the only light, the torches fallen lightless on the ground. 

 

Lardo did not stop, she continued with Shitty, pulling Eric up the long steps which lead toward the main portion of the keep. 

 

“Where are we going?” Eric asked, wanting rest, but knowing that he could not afford it. 

 

“We are gathering all who are left in the upper portion of the keep, where it is safe to gather. Or more safe” Lardo replied. From behind more voices echoed off the stone, and behind that the sound of war. At length they came upon a door guarded by two of the younger knights-to-be. Through the thick pine a room sat, poorly prepared for occupancy. Stacks of goods and weapons occupied the periphery. At the center, Lady Alicia sat nearest the door, a narrow sword in the palm of her hand, the right being bound by a servant in Zimmermann colors. Eric came to a stop at the sight, the blade in hand accompanied by half-attended leathers, as though Lady Alicia had been caught in the middle of dressing for battle. 

 

“Oh, thank the gods,” she said, moving to stand at the disdain of the servant who wrapped her arm. “Have any of you seen my son?”

 

Eric did not know where to begin. 


	22. Little Boy

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Dratâb comes to the forefront of Eric and Jack's worries.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Ahh!! I think we are nearing the end of this story! I have had an incredible time the past two months writing this for fic for you all. I cannot wait to see what happens with the ending, nor I am sure, can you. 
> 
> As always I have taken inspiration from music. Epigraph and title for this chapter from Aurora's "Little Boy In The Grass"
> 
>  
> 
> *Par les dieux : "by the gods"

 

Let them run from the violence  
The world is way too cold and bright for their eyes  
Little boy runs beside them  
As they take his hand and jump to the sky  
  
When will my healing come?  
When will my healing come?  
Alone, sinking like a stone  
When will my healing come?  
Alone...

⨁

 

Whether Eric’s collapse was due to the sheer weight of his exhaustion or the shock of seeing Lady Alicia readying for a return to battle was a debate that could be had at a later time, when Eric was not crumpled on the floor. The fall he took was abrupt, so much so that Lardo, who had been supporting Eric along their walk to the room, fell over with him under the suddenness of his descent. 

 

Lady Alicia was the first to move. Her servant joining her down on the ground near Eric. Neither were quite touching him, but floated in proximity as though unsure of where to begin. Eric wondered what he must have looked like. One sleeve entirely burned away, that much he knew. Perhaps it revealed nothing but a missing arm, or some mangled state otherwise. He couldn’t feel it, and he didn’t have the courage to look. He shivered violently, thoroughly drenched with his own sweat, what smelled like the bear’s blood, and what the blizzard had been able to dump upon his small frame. 

 

“These need to come off,” Lady Alicia said, her warm hands already beginning to disassemble the already failing clasps of his cloak. Distantly Eric heard Lardo and Shitty trade worried phrases with the servant. 

 

“What happened to his arm?” she asked. 

 

“I don’t know, maybe…”

 

“Both of you, find something useful to do” Alicia said tartly. 

 

They jumped into action, chastised enough by the lady’s tone to flee from Eric’s side in search of some other activity. He felt his head droop back under its own weight, and was startled by the strange liminal space between awareness and quickening unconscious. It was like a pendulum motion, each downward slope bringing him closer to darkness. If his head swung the course again he would surely pass out. 

 

“Just a second, Eric, we will have you in warm things soon enough.”

 

Eric tried to move, feeling much too burdensome for making Lady Alicia and her attendant disrobe him entirely themselves. Jack’s mother didn’t need to be worrying about him when… when Jack...

 

Eric nearly knocked the two over as he flung himself into a failed upright position, Jack’s name half-dying on his lips as he faltered. He fell over again, his legs gone from his control. There was still no feeling to be had in his feet, it was like attempting to stand on cotton spools rather than flesh and bone. 

 

“ _ Sit, _ ” was said with enough authority that Eric’s weary, blinkered mind was able to latch on to the simplicity of the command and obey it. There was really no way he could have ignored her, even if he wanted to. His legs, after their brief outburst, refused to move again. 

 

Quickly Eric was stripped down to the very lightest of his underthings. Then, unceremoniously, Shitty and Lardo returned with a large blanket and together with help bundled Eric into it. He was taken, mutedly as he could hardly hear through the thick textile that wrapped around his head like a shawl, over to a spot near the room’s hearth. He must have been set down on a simple crate, the edge dug into his rear even through the blanket’s layers. Everything around him had the glazed look of things seen through half-opened eyes. He doubted how long he would be able to hold out against the hunger for sleep which quickly made a meal of his fortitude. 

 

“We need to make sure the upper rooms are safe to stay in, you’ll just be here for a few minutes, Bitty.” 

 

Shitty remained with him while Lardo, Lady Alicia and her woman set off down the hall with a few of the keep’s staff. In between spurts of sudden sleep, which came upon Eric and left in mere flashes and false starts, Shitty narrated what was happening in the room and the keep beyond. Lord Robert and his men had returned to the safety of the great hall, doing what they could to bar the door. They finally had to pile anything that could be burned in front of the opening, as the  _ Ossa  _ simply beat the barrier down. Now, smoke trailed lazily through the keep from where the main door, and the mound in its cavity, burned away. Outside, the  _ Ossa _ could be heard calling, howling, and screaming into the impossibly grey sky of the blizzard. 

 

Jack had still not been seen in the room, but some of the others said that he was in the keep, working to strengthen the defenses where they could. Eric, even only half awake, didn’t need Shitty to explain to him the severity of the situation they now found themselves. Burning the front door, fire the only way to keep the  _ ossa _ out… they were walking astride a perilously thin line, one which grew meager with each step. He doubted if he’d even wake from his exhaustion. It was likely that he’d pass, taken by ailment or  _ Ossa _ . 

 

The weight of the day’s violence finally overcame him. He turned half-wise toward Shitty, attempting to say his goodbyes, before he fell soundlessly to sleep. 

 

⨁ 

  
  


Eric woke by grades of awareness, first in the the bone deep ache that stretched from head to hind. Then the space between sleeping and wakefulness, not quite standing on either side but with one foot in each pool. He tossed and turned and, when his limbs wrapped themselves in a thick cover that refused to budge and further, lay trapped for a while. He felt feverish, the way that one might feel in the spring when illness came quickly and left with the late showers. His body was stripped of clothing and yet he sweated, thoroughly drenching his sheets by the time he finally awoke.

 

Jack was the first thing he saw. And it was not a visage of Jack that he often had the opportunity to observe. This one was of Jack, asleep himself, slumped over in a chair that had clearly been moved into place from some prior location. The bedding was slightly moved from the edge of Eric’s bed, covering just the top of Jack’s legs. A thin shawl was draped around his shoulders, as though someone had caught him sleeping and covered him up, even if just lightly. 

 

Exhaustion was now a familiar company, and Eric let it pull him heavily against the thick down pillows and rest for a moment. In this space it was just himself and Jack. Jack, who seemed as though he had just come back from the battle. There was still a streaks of ash, dark black, against the pallor of his cheek. His clothes were thankfully changed from the ones he’d worn to battle. A dull grey shirt over pants that Eric couldn’t quite make out in the half light of the room. Even in new clothes, he looked how Eric felt, run ragged.

 

They sat like that for an incredible length of time, long enough that when Jack stirred and began to wake Eric had almost completely fallen back to sleep. Jack blinkered around the room as he adjusted, the sound of his joints popping audible to Eric where he lay waiting. 

 

Jack noticed the audience he had almost immediately. The smile it earned Eric was almost blinding, one of untarnished relief and joy without restraint. 

 

“Bits,” Jack said, leaning entirely off the chair to put his arms around Eric’s torso in an odd, angled embrace that left Jack’s chest pressing into Eric’s face. He replied as best he could, his left arm coming up to wrap around where Jack’s hair touched the skin at the back of his neck. His right arm seemingly  motionless at his side. 

 

The placement shocked remembrance into Eric. With dread he pushed  away from Jack so that he could turn his tenuous attention to the arm which until now had lay tucked underneath the thick duvet. The motion to uncover the arm was slow, accompanied by a silence that Eric could only feel thankful for. He almost cried out at what he saw. 

 

The arm under the covers was whole, all fingers accounted for on a hand which was blessedly still attached. The skin, however, belied what might have dwelled beneath. Purples, browns, and a sickly yellow etched the lines of ligament and muscle under Eric’s skin. The bruising was the most instence around the hand, where Eric’s skin was plum-like and awful to look at, swollen in the way dead things were when the rot set in. He could hardly feel anything at all from the limb, as though whatever had happened, whatever the fire had eaten away, had taken his sense of touch with it. 

 

“They think it was from the bear attack,” Jack offered, helping to break Eric from the cancerousness that was his cyclical anxious thoughts. “I don’t think Shitty told them what he and Lardo had seen you do. They think it just was crushed somehow.”

 

Eric looked to Jack. He seemed… apologetic, almost. For what, Eric wasn’t entirely sure. Nevertheless he relented when Jack reached forward and carefully slipped his hands around Eric’s left. 

 

“But he told you?” Eric knew the answer already, knowing the windidness with which Shitty often talked did not stop at normal lines of discourse. It was a wonder, even, that he’d kept himself from telling Lady Alicia or the others. 

 

“Yes, he said that you set your ‘entire  _ gods damned _ arm on  _ fucking _ fire’ and that you didn’t even seem all too bothered by it,” Jack answered, delivering a rather frighteningly accurate impression of Shitty. Eric could have laughed, if he’d not been reminded of the purpose of his unintentional self-outing. 

 

“I’d done it once prior,” Eric said at length. “It was when we were still in Samwell, when we were attacked and your father’s man died. I lit him and an  _ ossa _ that attacked Shitty on fire. I had hoped that everyone else was too caught up in the fight at the time to notice. This time, though...”

 

Jack nodded, his thumb working softly at the aching back of Eric’s hand. Save the arm which seemed almost ghostlike, the rest of his body was a living pinched nerve, every pulse sending a reminder of what he’d done to himself in his flight from the  _ Ossa _ . 

 

“And the  _ Ossa _ , Jack?” Eric said, calling back to himself what Shitty had said, the burning of the door. 

 

The other froze in his massaging, taking a steadying breath before continuing. 

 

“Though the barrier fire has burned down to ember they have gone,” Jack said. “Whether they remain nearby, or are at Samwell proper, that is uncertain.”

 

Eric understood the pain in Jack’s brevity. Every moment the  _ Ossa _ were not attacking the keep, the possibility that they were elsewhere was undoubtable. Whether they bolstered their numbers with the lives of Samwell’s people, or what dead things did to bide time, Eric could hardly begin to guess at. Hopefully they were rotting, though no amount would be fast enough for Eric’s desire.

 

He thought for a moment about what had happened prior to the attack, what signs he must have missed that would have indicated the  _ Ossa _ attack in such magnitude. They were in numbers so much greater than when Jack and the others had been attacked in the weeks prior. The reports of missing people that had drawn the Zimmermanns to the north to check on their son, of course, but what had been out in the woods was a number far greater than a missing family or two. Of everything that Eric knew, which was little, and what he could guess at, which was even less, he could not shake the voice that haunted him from the veil of sleep. 

 

“Jack, I need to ask you a serious question,” he said at last, turning it over in his head like a worry stone, attempting to rub off the parts that were too sharp for the skin of the palm.”

 

“Of course, Bits.”

 

Eric took a breath before beginning. 

 

“Did you see  _ Dratâb _ ?”

 

Jack’s confusion was evident in the way he tilted his head back, turning his hard blue eyes on Eric in a way that he hadn’t done in many weeks. Eric considered it now as a look of almost predatory attention. Jack was dissecting everything he’d said, turning it over behind his eyes. His brow pulled together and down as he thought, pinching his face horribly. For a moment Eric thought he wouldn’t answer at all. 

 

“Eric I don’t think I understand what you…”

 

“...It’s quite simple to answer,” he replied slowly. “Did you or any of the others  _ see Dratâb _ ? _ ” _

 

A pause, and then,  “No. Why?”

 

“Because I dreamed of him before we were woke in the morning to the hellishness.” Eric pushed himself up so that he was pressed against the headrest. He told himself it was to rest the labor of his neck, but he knew it was so that he and Jack were on a more even level. He denied Jack’s aid, using his left hand to do most of the work, the right hanging uselessly at his side. He began again when he was settled, and pointedly met Jack’s gaze, now more level than before. 

 

“In my dream he came to me. I cannot remember why, if I ever knew, but he said to me ‘you have been warned… when he people of the north fall, you will not be spared.’ And then he became a  _ heartwood _ and everything went black. I woke up unable to move from the fear.”

 

“ _ Par les dieux,  _ Eric, I don’t know what to say.” Jack pushed at the flesh under his eyes, working over the cheeks. “Why didn’t you tell me sooner?”

 

Eric gave him what he hoped was a look of disbelief, disdain, and annoyance all bundled together into one. 

 

“Right, no time.” A beat of silence. “You think an unrestrained god of decay from northern myth is coming down from the winds to wage war upon Samwell and its people?”

 

Had it been said by any other, Eric might have turned away at the implication of his ignorant stupidity that rode within such a question. But the way that Jack offered it, with a care that expressed an effort to understand, Eric could only nod conspiratorially and continue. 

 

“I know how it sounds, but what else am I supposed to think?” he asked, hushed by the closeness between them. “I am from the south, there is no reason, no sensible explanation, why _I_ am seeing one of _your_ deities.” Jack frowned at that. “Fine, one of _your_ _people’s_ deities. And clearly not one who is fond of you people in the north.”

 

They sat in silence while Jack processed what Eric had offered, and while Eric turned over his own thoughts with a slantwise, haphazard approach. Why it was he who saw  _ Dratâb  _ did not, or possibly could not, be explained by Eric. He had wondered, from the first dream, if his ailment was somehow implicated. Without no small amount of self-deprecation, Eric was thoroughly featureless when his ailment was removed from his identity. If his flames were the reason for  _ Dratâb’s  _ attention, it had to mean something. 

 

“ _ Flame of the South… _ ” Jack recalled. 

 

Eric caught this as it was said in passing, and it was clear by the unfocused nature of his gaze that Jack was still deep in his own thoughts.  _ Dratâb  _ had only addressed Eric as such, ember, or coal, or what ever exhaustive choice of fire related vernacular. There was no way that  _ Dratâb  _ wasn’t drawn in some way to Eric because of what he was. 

 

“If we consider for a moment than  _ Dratâb _ exists,” Jack began cautiously. Eric had to laugh at this, something about Jack’s lack of belief in the divine when he fought slanted creatures had a certain sense of hilarity. Maybe it was Eric’s drowsiness. 

 

“It may be that he visited you in your dreams not because he wants to scare you off, necessarily…” Jack ignored his laughter, as was probably the right thing to do given the conversation’s nature. “But because he fears what you could do to his plans.”

 

“Jack, I am hardly a man, in age, stature or ability, there is nothing that a go would find in me worthy of sparking fear.”

 

It was Jack’s turn to levy a look of disbelief and contempt in Eric’s direction. His mouth hang open. Eric tried not to become too angered at his own behavior, childish as it was, turned back on him.

 

“Eric, you can set your own body on fire and live with almost no sign of injury,” he said, pointing to Eric’s right arm. “ _ That _ is the first time I have ever seen you wounded by your own powers, whatever they be. And it was because to my understanding  _ your entire arm was on fire _ !”

 

Eric knew Jack was speaking the truth, but it was one thing to understand that something about him, something that was and would never really feel natural, somehow was good in this situation. It didn’t take much to recall the dread, and bone deep fear, at the idea of being discovered. He’d burned his father, once when blame should not have been laid on a boy before the age of ten. For all of Eric’s conscious life he’d been the one that people kept a distance from, even if they only knew the rumors. Damn him if he was able to shake the abuse that sat in him like a lead weight at the simple snap of fingers. 

 

“Jack, I have been the unnerving, disgusting, queer boy with queerer powers my  _ entire _ life. I’m not used to the idea of being seen as a threat by someone who wasn’t in the right to think so!” 

 

The tears that Eric cried were from the frustration at feeling like this in the first place. Something about crying when he didn’t want to always made more tears unfurl, as though a punishment for his emotional weakness. 

 

“And gods damn me for thinking I’m anything special enough to be  _ chosen  _ by a god, as though that’s even marginally close to being a good thing in this situation. I mean fuck, he’s trying to kill us all and I think I’m something special!” 

 

Eric turned over, shielding himself from Jack and the onrushing of embarrassment and loathing that hit with the weight of crested waves. It was disgusting how quick he was reduced to tears, to the part of him that he’d always knew he was, a weak little boy who’d never had the ability to grow beyond the bounds that had been placed upon him by people as arbitrary in his life as the phases of the moon. 

 

“Bitty,” Jack said, moving from the chair to kneel alongside the bed. His arms came up on the mattress but he did not rest his hands on Eric, choosing instead to rub the sheet next to him. It was a welcome gesture, Eric could not handle being touched as he was. 

 

“Eric, I cannot begin to understand what your life was like prior to your time here in Samwell.” His words were stalled and awkward. They wore the care with which they were chosen in the disjointedness of his speech. “But I want you to know that whatever you went through, it does not define who you are. You are not the sum of your traumas, they are a part of you but they can never express who you are truely. And might I say that I think you are pretty special?”

 

Eric turned over, his heart somewhere in the space that might have lied between his throat and the flesh therein. Jack looked worried, pale, old if Eric was honest. It startled another wave of tears from him. Regret, not for anything he’d done, but for what the world had done to Jack. He looked aged, and his words spoke to experiences that Eric himself could not guess at. They stared at each other like that for several moments. It looked as though at any moment Jack might join Eric in crying. He desperately hoped that didn’t happen, it would entire dissolve what little control Eric still maintained.

 

“I never expected a speech like this from you.” He broke the silence wetly through his tears, trying to bring himself back from the edge of hysterically sobbing that he felt himself moving towards. 

 

“I’m so glad you noticed. It is taking every portion of my willpower to do this right,” Jack replied, and then leaned forward so that his face was closer to Eric’s. “May I kiss you, Eric?”

 

Even drenched in his own tears and startlingly exhausted from crying, Eric accepted with a minuscule nod. 

 

“You know you don’t have to ask me every time you want to kiss me.”

 

Jack kissed him thoroughly. It was the kind of kiss that seemed anticipated, like Jack had rehearsed in his head exactly how he wanted to position his slightly-trembling hands. Or how he had foreseen the way Eric would slowly lean back into the kiss, beckoning Jack to follow him onto the bed. They both sighed when Jack pulled away instead.

 

“I don’t mean to be a unwanting, but we need to go.”

 

“Oh?” Eric said, suddenly remembered that life outside of their room continued, and in ways that seemed more grim after having been allowed to experience Jack in any capacity. 

 

“Yes, you and I must to go and measure up what it will take to kill a god.”


	23. And If Its True, I'll Go There With You

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Chapter title and Epigraph from Phildel's "The Wolf"

 

 

You were sharp as a knife to get me  
You were a wolf in the night to fetch me back  
The wishes I've made are too vicious to tell  
Everyone knows I am going to Hell

And if it's true  
I'll go there with you

 

⨁

 

Eric began to think that at some point in his family’s history a curse had been levied upon one Bittle or another (possibly many, it he was being honest with himself). By some trick of fate the curse had fallen not on the desired recipient but, like stones do from raised river beds into silty-heavy water, had fallen haphazardly down the family line until it all landed on Eric. 

 

He thought this, not because of the torment and trauma that had befallen him the prior two decades of his life (though he had every right to), but because of what had unfolded in the last half span of minutes. Primarily, that he was being chased by an unnumbered group of  _ ossa _ through the corridors of the keep, alone and without any weapon to speak of but his own limbs.

 

Plans, it seemed, had no interest in working out for Eric. Nor was luck or fortune or divinity on his side in any other way, as the only god from whom attention was paid to him was a god that would be best forgotten from human history altogether. He ran, his lungs rattling around in his chest like buckets on the end of a well line. He wished for once that he’d just had the sense as a child to climb the stone rim and fall in. 

 

⨁ 

 

Jack and Eric had, with the few minutes they’d been able to steal before all semblance of order dissolved, tried to explain their theories to the Zimmermanns and those who remained nearby. It had gone hardly as well as either of them had hoped. Staunch silence from their friends, marked by a look on Shitty’s face that spoke to an utter lack of comprehension, and a conspiratorial glance between Ransom and Holster. The response that came from the Zimmermann parents was no less discouraging. 

 

“Never in our family’s history has something like this come about,” Lord Robert said. It was in those moments that Eric could see the man’s age upon him, not as a part of his nature, but as a shawl that weighed on him from all sides. Perhaps it was from the exertion of the fight, or the stress therein, or the lack of sleep which he was sure they all suffered in equal measure. 

 

“The rise of an  _ Ossa _ army, a southerner receiving divine message, or the presence of a god’s hand in all of this?” Jack asked with an edge that Eric was slowly beginning to understand was arid humor. Though in this circumstance perhaps more a product of exasperation than any attempt at jest. 

 

The half-wise joke did nothing to assuage the unease Eric felt.  Dreaming of the god of decay, prophesying the end of the northern people was one thing. That it was a southerner who did it, one who hailed from lordling blood to make it worse. Eric hadn’t even begun to see it from that side, how it must look, until Jack mentioned as much. He was practically heralding their demise, even if he took no joy in it. 

 

“You know the answer to that, you’ve read the books more so than your father or I,” Lady Alicia said.

 

In the time since he’d last seen Jack’s mother, she had been further patched up. Her right forearm was entirely bandaged, the thick padding of it could be seen under her metal greeves, unequal in size and fit. Like her husband, she wore her weariness about her. It had to be said, however, that something about the vigor of stress seemed to slide off the woman. It was as though like the oiled back of a duck, it pooled only long enough to cast off a quick reflection before slipping away again. This didn’t stop a worrying set to over take her brow as she pondered their suggestion further. 

 

“I was the one who dreamed this, and expressed my concern that  _ Dratâb  _ might be involved, Jack simply listened.” Eric wanted at the very least to absolve any judgment they might cast toward Jack. Only his own intelligence should be up for question after suggesting what was clearly a poorly received theory. The gathering’s collective countenance was entirely an indication of uncertainty. “We could just as easily decide some other course of action, I am sure there are other options we can pursue?”

 

The silence that followed was damning. 

 

“If we take a risk for a moment and consider the possibility,” Lady Alicia broke the quivering air. With relief she seemed to have moved between the parties of disbelief, and Jack and Eric. “Is there any resource in the library which could help us?”

 

She directed the question toward Robert and Jack, neither of whom appeared to have an answer. A shuffle of feet came from the side of the room, and everyone not deep in thought turned toward it, eyes drawn simply to the distraction alone. 

 

It was Ransom who shifted, and then said,

 

“I’ve spent some time in the library, reading some of the collection that I had never seen in other collections prior… meaning there was a lot that I read.” He seemed nervous, though it was unclear if the energy was at the idea of knowing something the Zimmermanns didn’t, or at the stress of remembering something as arbitrary as god-killing likely was for those whom the need was not… vital.  “I could find the book I’m thinking of, but I’m not even sure it could offer any help.”

 

Lord Robert pulled from his pondering. “But this is still a tentative plan, we haven’t the slightest idea if  _ Dratâb  _ is truly even related to any of this, or if Lord Eric’s dreams are mere coincidence.”

 

His statement, though true, killed the energy in the room with remarkable efficiency. Silence fell, and for a moment Eric thought that that would be it, his idea, the only one they had to work with at the moment, would die from a single pointed blow. 

 

“Papa,” Jack said, in a manner of speech he rarely used around Eric, “you know as well as I that we have never had the privilege to believe in coincidence.”

 

Robert regarded his son with an appraising look, one that drew Jack’s posture straight until it seemed they both would remain petrified as such forever. 

 

“I know, I know. I only wished that for once we would have the freedom for it.” Robert looked to Alicia. She returned it with an unreadable expression.

 

“Sir Ransom, that book?”

 

It should have followed linearly from there. 

 

⨁

 

The  _ ossa _ waited until the very last of the barrier fire had long dwindled beyond lingering ember to hollow and dusted ash. Then, when no light of the coals could be seen through the density of the blizzarding airs, they returned. It was breathtaking, in the way the wildness of nature often was, how the  _ ossa _ were able to move with indefatigable efficiency. They stormed Faber hall in mere seconds, destroying any blockades they found, shearing those down who were foolish enough to be brave. 

 

Eric and the others knew of this only from the screams which echoed up the long staircases and down the stone walkways. They bounced from the smooth hewn surface of granite in ways that, even when the throat of the voice had long been severed, the screams remained a haunting air in the atmosphere. 

 

“Go!” Robert said, pushing Ransom, Eric and Jack in the direction of the library, whose tower was adjacent to the corridor down which they would turn at the end of their own. They made it a few feet before Eric realized Jack had not followed. 

 

“Jack!” he called, but the other was already moving away from the pair, disappearing with Holster, Lardo, and the others around the corner. Eric guessed it was to hold the line for them. This did nothing to stop the racing of his heart, nor the way his blood seemed to drum incessantly in his ears. 

 

“Come on, Bitty, we have several floors to climb,” Ransom said. 

 

Eric took a breath, and they were gone. 

 

⨁

 

Eric maintained his pace, keeping Ransom just to the front of him. If something were to come, Eric had his baselard and the knowledge that, though he was exhausted and terrified beyond belief, his fire had come forth unbidden nearly every time prior. 

 

The corridor down which they traveled was capped on either end by narrower, higher towers of the keep. It made an E shape, a secondary, smaller corridor leading off near the middle of the corridor to connect again with the drum tower that housed Faber hall. Enclosed in between the corridors were two identical baileys into which Eric and Ransom could see. Anyone who had sought them for refuge were cut down. They could see the blood on the snow.  They hardly had the time to turn away from the sight when they heard the telltale echo of inhuman feet clattering down the perpendicular corridor toward them.

 

Eric should have known, or feared, that the  _ ossa _ would be capable hunters, choosing to not only come from the way which Jack and the others blocked, but from the junction connection as well. He didn’t know if it was scent or sight or hearing that allowed the slanted creatures to hunt as proficient as they did. How they knew where they were holed up didn’t seem to matter now that they were soon to be in the thick of it. 

 

Three disparate creatures rounded the corner on the sound of flapping, clattering steps. The tallest was the same horned creature from before. It looked even taller now that it stood in the stone corridor. The height of it alone made the creature and almost impossible enemy to face. It was flanked on either side by two devastatingly mangled bodies. Perhaps they had once been farm animals or the pets of a household, but all ability to tell was lost to Eric. Their fur was matted with gore and frost, and the limbs that remained were of little state but muscle stretched taut over bone. 

 

It made the blood in Eric’s extremities seize up, and his heart nearly pop in his chest like an overripe peach dropped from too high a branch. Ransom slammed to a sudden stop, the pallor of his cheeks sending his dark skin into worryingly grey territories. 

 

“Bitty.”

 

“Ransom, you need to get through.”

 

The  _ ossa _ did not wait for them to argue over who would be sacrificing themselves foolishly for the other. The horned creature reared back on its hooves before charging forward in an impressively coordinated assault. Ransom rolled away to the left and was lost in the fray that followed. Eric lost his composure and fell to the ground. He was there mere seconds before his unnatural instincts overpowered him. He raised his baselard and closed one eye in expectation of the collision. The creature continued forward as though Eric’s lofted weapon meant nothing. 

 

The small baselard hit at the wrong angle, piercing through dead flesh only to crack violently against a thick bony plate mere inches beneath. The baselard bounced back out of the flesh, jolting Eric far more than even his dread had anticipated.

 

The creature called out, the sound an indescribable, wavering howl. It swung its plate-like horns around. Only Eric’s heightened ability to fall down at the first sight of danger saved him from catching the blow to his head. The drop and roll brought him directly into the path of the other two  _ ossa _ , who thankfully for Ransom appeared entirely unoccupied. Eric had no idea how he’d gotten away, but even as he sat surrounded, he knew that there was still a chance some of them might survive this.

 

He lifted his right arm, trying to call on the fire. What followed was only a strained pain in his right side. It would not come from there, even as it quivered inside him, ready to spill forth. He switched hands, already knowing that the loss of his weapon from his dominant hand could be the death of him. The fire, however, was something that could not be left wanting. He drew it out from himself. He understood the toll it took on his body, he could feel the threads of fire eating away at his strength, taking the very energy from his muscles. He wouldn’t be able to remain alight for long.

 

It was lucky, then, that the nearest  _ ossa _ did not move back fast enough when Eric struck out at it. It faltered on three legs, the third of which was barely attached by a few ligaments. Unknowing of how else to do it, Eric slapped the unfortunate creature in the face. The blow was sickening, even to his flaming hand the rotted flesh left traces of itself. The impact was wet, not at all the leathered texture of the scraps which Eric had assumed he’d feel. 

 

What followed was a shriek that Eric had heard only once before, when during his formative years his cousin a several years his elder had found a southern black widow on his shirtsleeve. This sound then and now was like that of a pitch produced on an instrument not intended for such a function. The  _ ossa _ , head newly set ablaze, thrashed back attempting to extinguish itself by rolling across the cool uneven floor. The fire ate away at its body preternaturally fast, tearing through flesh and skin with ease. 

 

The other  _ ossa  _ skulked back, immediately wary of Eric and the fire that still burned from his fist. While the burning creature released horrid wails, fat and muscle popping and spitting stray sparks, Eric hurriedly turned over his next move in his head. Fear was potent. He quivered in his own skin, the fire nearly going out in spite of itself.  _ Breathe _ he thought in Jack’s voice.  _ Breathe _ .

 

If he held his fist out in front of him like a shield, perhaps he’d be able to corral the remaining  _ ossa _ far enough from him that he could get away. He could spur them back, make a convincing enough show of lighting something else on fire to send a clear message.

 

Swinging horns caught Eric across his weakened right side, bringing his frantic thoughts to an immediate halt. He reeled back from the blow. His fire went out with hardly a trace of smoke, and the blade dropped from the infirm grip of his bruised hand. He was flung along the stone floor, crashing heavily against the far wall with more force than Eric could have even guessed at. It was as though every bone in his body had suddenly been hammered unrestrained force. He gasped, unable to breathe at the shock of it. The tall creature, famined legs stepping forward on sharply hooved feet, approached alongside the burning corpse with remarkable indifference. 

 

Eric lost all sensation but the beating away of his heart in his chest, and an awareness of the deadening of sound from his fear. Each step the  _ ossa _ moved further brought Eric’s nightmares closer to the surface. It was not until the creature was nearly on top of him that he realized, pushing through his own fear, that inaction would be his death. 

 

He caught the creature in the front leg with a kick from both feet. It was aimed just at the knee, but seeing as the  _ ossa _ was a much taller than Eric, it struck more accurately off the upper shin. The creature, though dead and the blow landing where Eric had not intended it to, startled nonetheless. Eric took the few seconds he’d garnered himself, flung himself into a blind sprint. He made it not even five feet before he heard the resounding call of the  _ ossa _ , and their pursuit. 

  
He only hoped that Ransom had made it to the library, and hadn’t misremembered what he had read. Perhaps in the end it wouldn’t matter one way or another. The  _ ossa  _ appeared to be the type of slanted who would kill them all, whether a god told them to or not. 


	24. Raise It Up

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This is not our end.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hi, apologies for my radio silence. I've been sitting on this for a while (save what I wrote tonight) because its surprisingly hard to put an end to things. Expect one final chapter of this.
> 
> Good luck with this one, if it seems scattered, its because it is. 
> 
>  
> 
> Chapter title and epigraph from Florence and the Machine's "Rabbit Heart (Raise It Up)" with some minor edits.

You made a deal, and now it seems you have to offer up  
But will it ever be enough? (Raise it up, raise it up)  
It's not enough (Raise it up, raise it up)

Here I am, a rabbit-hearted boy  
Frozen in the dark nights  
It seems I've made the final sacrifice

This is a gift

⨁

 

The clatter of pursuit grew with every step that Eric climbed. Despite his best efforts, little distance was made between himself and the  _ ossa _ . The stairs beneath him thundered, a thrumming in the floor that suggested they had not only kept pace, but grown in number. Eric didn’t look back. Partly knowing that if he could see them behind him, as there was no other way to look down the staircase further than the few feet immediately in the rear, he’d already be dead.

 

Luckily for him there was no threat of a second staircase to this level. There was no other way, unless they had begun to scale the walls. Simple, then, to trust that there would be no issue getting into the library to speak with Ransom. The only problem, one that Eric had not yet figured out, would be how to survive getting back down. 

 

Eric exited the final landing of the stairs in a blind dash. He rounded the corner, entering the section of corridor separating the library’s wing from the other side of the tower. He nearly collapsed at the sight of an  _ ossa _ , a deer of some sort, battering on the double doors with its head. The fur and flesh had already been beaten, until parts of the skull pink from the blood were exposed beneath. It turned its vacant, endless eyes on Eric and released a horrid and wet moan that sounding like nothing Eric had ever heard a woodland creature utter. 

 

“Ransom!”

 

The  _ ossa _ lurched after Eric. Something seemed wrong with it, more so than any other  _ ossa _ , it was incapable of keeping itself steady. It came toward Eric and, faltering over its own feet, stumbled to the ground. All the while it moaned, and Eric heard the not-so-distant replies echoing off the stone walls. 

 

“Ransom!” Eric called with renewed panic, hoping for any god listening that the other could hear him through the thick pine doors. 

 

The sound of shifting within the room answered Eric after a moment, and then from within,

 

“ _ Bitty _ ?! I need to clear the doorway can you wait?”

 

Eric swallowed the  _ no _ he desperately wanted to call out, unwilling to send Ransom (who was prone to debilitating stress) into a fit when he was still trapped outside the library. 

The deer regained its footing enough to turn. The wet cobblestone, slick with the creature’s brackish blood, did little to aid it as it shuffled forward. He could see now that the creature’s skull was impacted severely, decidedly from battering itself against the door. Behind it Eric saw the first of the pursuing  _ ossa _ round the corner, entering the hall with a reverberating roar. 

 

Before he could even garner in himself hopelessness an arm shot out from the cracked doorway and, with the unskillfulness of a body impeded by terror, yanked Eric’s slim form into the room. Ransom was there, his face impressively stricken with mixed shock and relief. Wordlessly he began to throw things at the door. Furniture, Eric realized, that must have been hauled from the far sides of the room.

 

He nearly released his blader down his own trousers when the first strike landed against the wooden blockade, far stronger than Eric had seen the deer swinging itself prior. Ransom swore colorfully, throwing with abandon what he could onto the pile at the door. 

 

“It won’t hold” he said, panic clear in his voice. 

 

“Ransom, forget the door, what did you find?”

 

Eric was turned on with a look of impossible incredulity.

 

“ _ What _ ? We won’t need that damned book if we’re dead!”

 

“We won’t be able to do anything with them trapped outside,” Eric replied. He had no idea what could be in the book, if Ransom had even found it in the time Eric had tried to allow him. But knowing was better than not, and Eric had a sinking feeling about what he could do to keep the  _ ossa  _ out.

 

After a moment of Ransom standing slack jawed, the pounding keeping time behind him, he turned and grabbed Eric. They ran to the end of the library where the divans had once sat. The space was empty, bookcases eschewed and tomes fallen from shelves in the celerity of his prior actions. On the floor, amidst a pile of what must have been rejects (which seemed to have spilled from the balcony above where an even larger pile sat), was an opened text, sections of parchment larger than the standard size folded out to reveal their contents. 

 

“This” he said breathlessly, his words beginning to fly nearly faster than Eric could follow “is a historical account of a woman and her fight with the goddess  _ Eniné _ . When I read it, I thought it was fictitious, a fable or such. I’d been more in search of books on the sciences of this era at the time, so I didn’t think it was that significant. But then I saw  _ this. _ ”

 

Ransom turned the text over to Eric, showing a sparse illustration of two figures. One, undoubtedly the god, was draped entirely in cloth, reeling back from what appeared to be a woman. Beams, or what Eric perceived to be beams, arced out from her face where it was pressed to the forehead of the goddess. What passed between them was lost to the blinding light.

 

“What…”

 

“ _ Eniné  _ is the northern goddess of unjust violence and malice,” Random said. He turned the page and drew his finger along the bottom phrases of a paragraph. It was in Jack’s language, which Eric still could not even begin to perceive. 

 

“I don’t read this Ransom, I can’t–”

 

“ _ The matron Metrodora, seeing the true nature of the goddess, took Eniné in her embrace as she would a daughter, and chastised her not with lash or censure, but with kindness and understanding.” _

 

“Ransom I don’t know what is to be done with this.”

 

His reply was cut off by a crash. The pounding at the door became impossible to ignore. A second crash sounded. It was accompanied by the rending sound of wood. Eric couldn’t see the door from where they were, behind the many shelves, but he doubted that they had more than a few moments of time. He looked around them, trying to figure out where they might be able to run. There would be no hiding from the  _ ossa _ , nor could Eric or Ransom scale the chimney above the unlit hearth. He turned away from it, scanning the room before his eyes landed on their only option. 

 

“Ransom, what is in the other wing of this tower?” Eric asked, appraising the far window, through which the sun had long begun to set from its noon peak toward the gloaming hour, impossible to really be seen through the blizzard. 

 

“Euh, to my knowledge nothing by storage for the older things, tat and such furnishings which didn’t find use elsewhere.” Ransom looked from Eric, to the window out which he gazed. 

 

“Why...”

 

Eric swallowed the hot threat of bile that already rose and walked the space from the hearth to the window. There was no visible latch for the giant pane of glass, nor did it seem like one would be found from the upper level which trimmed the room. He did see, however, the half foot or so of ledge that surrounded, hopefully, the entirety of the tower, sitting a foot or so below the base of the window. 

 

“I think we are going for a walk.”

 

Ransom’s eye went hilariously large. “No, Bitty I think we are going to have to find some other–”

 

The doors to the library disintegrated with a resounding crash and the tinkling of bits of wood hitting the surrounding environment. It was enough to shut Ransom up. As he stooped to bundle the tome away as best he could, Eric looked around to figure out some way to open the window. At a loss for other options he grabbed the largest tome he could find on the nearest shelf and hurled it at the window pane. 

 

The aged glass, despite its appearance, was more resilient that Eric had assumed. The tome hit, and with a quavering wobble from the clear surface, bounced back to the ground with a weighted thunk. In any other circumstance Eric might have cried laughing at the idiocy of the sight alone. Now, he could only turn to Ransom with a look of panic of his own. 

 

Ransom drew his sword out, something Eric had missed before, and with a weighted swing, brought the blunt head of his pommel against the pane. It held, but a long, veiny length of cracks ran out from the impact. He lifted his arm, brought the pommel into the marred surface again. The glass gave, shattering violently outwards, cascading down the several tens of feet, disappearing almost instantly into the greyness of the snow and the landscape beyond. The noise of the wailing wind outside tore through the library, sending in dustings of snow. 

 

An  _ ossa _ cried out from the front of the room. Then, unbelievably, came the sound of a single toppling bookcase. Eric could see it, just around the corner of the aisle which accessed the window, the case sway and then crash down. A second passed, and then the sound of bookcases falling dominated the space as, having been crashed into, they began to fall in succession. In a way that Eric could probably recount for years to come (if anyone survived the next several minutes) he and Ransom jumped out the window and onto the ledge, nearly avoiding being crushed by falling books and shelving. 

 

Whatever Eric had anticipated, skirting the ledge was far worse. It was iced by months spent exposed to the elements, and no doubt smooth from years of erosion. Eric stuck his slim fingers into the cracks of the wall, willing himself to not look down. Like a mantra he chanted it,  _ don’t look down, don’t look down.  _ He shimmied forward, and prayed. 

Ransom was worse off, weighted down as he was by the tome and the sword which, after a moment of struggling to return it to his sheath, was tossed into the open air. Eric, unlooking, could hear the faint whistle the metal made as the blade cut through the cold. The impact, when it hit the ground tens of feet below, was soundless. 

 

Eric continued on, even as his legs felt as though they had been replaced with sugar cane. He wobbled, cried out, and steadied twice before pausing. 

 

“Ransom, I need a moment.”

 

“Can you take it when we get back inside?” Ransom’s terror was clear, and Eric felt a bite at making him wait, at making him even get onto the ledge in general. 

 

They continued around the tower. It was slow going. Eric was painfully aware of the dependency on their handholds, and the threat that, when they rounded the edge of the tower and entered the head wind directly, they might be blown clean off their feet. Eric continued another large span before coming upon the first window. Inside he could still see the bookcases, slanted now as they were. They would need to proceed. 

 

He didn’t expect, of all things, for an  _ ossa _ to fly at the glass from within. The blow nearly launched Eric from the tower in his fright, as he’d been nearly across the pane and onto the other side. There was a liminal moment in which Eric looked in, and saw the visage of the creature looking out. It was a man, had been a man but was one no longer. He returned Eric’s gaze with hollow eyes. In them Eric saw the death of everyone he knew.

 

The second blow jolted Eric from his paralyzed state, and just as he crossed onto relatively more stable ground the glass shattered outward. With a scream the  _ ossa _ lashed out from within, catching its arms on the glass. 

 

“ _ Bitty! _ ” Ransom cried out at the  _ ossa  _ caught a fist full of the tunic on his right side and hauled at him. His arm was still far too weak to do much than flail uselessly, and Eric could almost feel the sensation of falling before it happened. 

 

Then with a blow that startled them both, Ransom smashed the tome into the side of the  _ ossa _ ’s head. It stunned the creature, long enough that Eric, with little sense, leaned back and yanked the creature out the window. It’s hands, slicked with its own blood, scrambled against Eric’s limbs as it tumbled head first into the waiting emptiness. He faltered, nearly following the  _ ossa _ down before his left hand found a deep socket in the stone wall and grabbed on with white-knuckled intensity. 

He broke his mantra. The sight was almost intoxicating, watching as the body fell end over end before crashing into the frozen earth. Eric waited to see if it would get up, knowing the lengths of abuse at which the  _ ossa _ could take and continue. 

 

What he saw, and what made the hot white jolt of genuinely disabling fear run through the entirety of his body, was the figure that stepped out from the half-shadows of the tower. Even from this height, Eric could feel the chill of its gaze, and see, atop the veiled head, a crown of blue ice.  _ Dratâb _ stood, draped in grey and the very chill of the air itself, waiting as though for Eric to continue. 

 

Ransom shifted forward, nudging at Eric until he turned. 

 

“...Eric” he said, as though not for the first time. “Let’s go.”

 

The rest of the journey around the tower was eventless, save for the presence of  _ Dratâb,  _ lingering below the tower at every step. 

 

⨁

 

Breaking into the window from outside proved more of a challenge than Eric had anticipated. It took the strength of panic, and the bluntness of several painful elbow jabs before the glass gave way and spilled the two of them into the darkness within. For a moment they sat in the glass spilled below the opened window and simply allowed themselves to breathe. 

 

Eric could not have been the only one who was surprised at the success of their continued existence. Ransom slumped down, taking in long drags of air. Around them snow mingled with dust that had been sent up by their entrance. The room was filled nearly to bursting with various shapes covered in thick, once-white fabric. 

 

Only a couple seconds passed before Eric made himself stand on shaking legs. 

 

“We need to get to the others.”

 

“If we must.” 

 

Ransom tried for an edge of humor, but Eric could hear in the flatness of his voice how close he truly was to collapsing under the stress. 

 

“You needn’t leave with me, you can remain here until–”

“Those are my friends dying out there, Bitty.” Ransom let a few stray tears fall before he caught the rest with a swipe from the back of his hand. “Let’s go.”

 

⨁

 

They found makeshift weapons under one of the many covered items. With little remorse they dismantled the legs from an oddly tall table. Thick, long, and ending in claw-foot curves. Eric laughed darkly at the idea of them breaking against the aged hide of an  _ ossa _ . But as Ransom had said, it was better than nothing. 

 

They waited by the door, which would lead out into the main corridor of the tower, until it seemed that nothing was waiting outside. The door, however, was firmly bolted, and so the sound of them bashing the lock out of the thick pine did little in the way of subtlety. 

 

They ran the moment the door swung open. Behind them, the crashing thud of  _ ossa _ rapidly vacating the library could be heard, even as they nearly jumped down the stairs. Ransom bolted down, worryingly quick for Eric’s ankles. A ravenous cry came from behind, and then the sound of a creature landing with the whack onto the landing. Whatever pursued wasted little time on the stairs, choosing to fling itself from one landing to the next, stopped from jumping down to them by the curvature of the stairs alone. 

 

Eric realised then that he had no idea where the others might be, nor what they would do once they reunited. Ransom still clutched the tome, but the solution it claimed to possess did little to assuage the dread that Eric felt rising. 

 

Ransom took the responsibility of deciding their course, turning off from the stairs at the next landing. He slammed Eric around the corner, jarring him to the wall, before turning back and tossing his makeshift club down the stairs. It hit with a crazed clatter, followed unbelievably, by the  _ ossa _ , who nearly flew past the doorway around which Eric and Ransom hid. 

 

The moment it passed they bolted, tearing off down the empty corridor. It was one that Eric had not spent much time prior, but Ransom seemed to know the way. He crashed through doors, bolting into chambers through their connecting nooks, and over furniture at a madman’s pace. 

 

They at last came out of a room into a corridor that was nearly as chilled as the air was outside. Turning to the left, Eric saw open space and a walkway, and to their right darkness down which the corridor’s torches had gone out. They turned left, walking the ten feet or so before the walls fell away, and Eric’s suspicions were confirmed. 

 

They stood stop the bridge which spanned the third floor, looking down upon Faber hall. The bridge was unmarked by the battle, save where someone had piled a countless number of furnishings, entirely blocking the way forward. 

 

Below, the main doors were entirely gone, the black scarring of fire smoke darkening the wall for tens of feet. Below, the ground was marred by brackish blood, ash, and limbs scattered about as though they had been discarded at leisure. The sound of clashing blades against flesh and shouting came from the hallway leading off from the main stairs, down which Eric hoped he would find his friends alive and in one piece. 

 

“Bitty…”

 

Eric looked around, wondering how best it would be to get down to them, without finding themselves separated by the main body of the  _ ossa _ force. 

 

“Eric!”

 

He turned at the second call from Ransom. At the end of the corridor down which they had come stepped a large body in the shadows. Eric pivoted already knowing that their way forward was blocked. 

 

“Fuck.”

 

“I second that,” Ransom said, shifting further back from the opening of the corridor. “Done in by a fucking moose is not how I was hoping to go.”

 

Maybe later he would take a moment to consider how quickly he was prone to feats of vertigo-inducing recklessness, but at the moment Eric had neither the time nor the energy for it. 

 

“Ransom, I have an idea and you are going to hate it even more than I do.”

 

Ransom turned to look at Eric just in time for him to fling himself over the side of the bridge nearest the corridor’s opening. The ground fell away and behind him, and his trajectory crashed into directly into the outer wall and the thick crimson tapestries which hung there. They were satiny smooth, horrifyingly so, and for the few seconds before Eric could find purchase he could do nothing but swear at himself for the utterness of his foolery. 

 

He slid down the length of tapestry nearly an entire floor before his grip caught and he was jerked into place. His right arm strained to hold its grip. Before it could give fully Eric slowly eased himself down. 

 

He lowered hardly two feet before a book flew past him, and then the entire tapestries flailed about as, with a scream that echoed off the four walls, Ransom descended with the grace of a sack of flour. Now that the both of them safely attached to the voluminous wall hangings, Eric continued down again. Halfway to the floor Eric had to jump to a second tapestry, which ripped down the edge and nearly sent him cascading down to the floor below. 

 

Both feet returning to solid ground was a sensation that Eric thought he’d already gotten enough of directly after entering the window, but somehow it was a feeling of endlessly repetitive relief. He didn’t have the time to so much as look up after Ransom, however, when an incredible gust of wind tore through the gaping front doors. 

 

Ash, snow, and the lighter bits of debris were tossed through the air, blinding Eric. His eyes stung, and the wicked chill, somehow even colder than before, cut through him. When he could again lower his arm, the burst of wind passed, he saw  _ Dratâb,  _ stood in the opening. It was almost as if the very air itself solidified around the god’s form, every fraction of heat drawn from the room. Eric could feel the way the cold that remained reached out for the fire in his veins, seaking, even though no fire was exposed to the elements, his energy. 

 

The sounds of battle, which had until now continued to echo from the upper floors, fell away. It was only Eric and  _ Dratâb,  _ the space between them littered with the cast-off remains of skirmishes long over. Eric wondered how long he could stand here, facing the other. He felt no part of his body eager to move in any way. Even as the largest voices in his mind cried out for him to run and never stop, his legs refused to move. 

 

“Bitty…” Ransom said from somewhere behind, in the reaches where Eric could not turn to look. “Do you see…”

 

“Go get the others.”

 

And Ransom was gone, the sound of his footfalls fading entirely before either Eric or  _ Dratâb  _ moved more than a hair's breadth. 

 

“ _Little Ember,”_ _Dratâb_ rasped, the leathery sound of the god’s voice accented by a veiled face. “ _Why do you linger still?”_

 

Eric had expected anger from the god, perhaps humor at his unintentional defiance, or at the worst, outright violence. The confusion and hesitance that seemed to rest in the other’s words startled him. It made little sense for a god to be surprised, especially as Jack had said, a god of visions. 

 

“I am here to defend my friends.”

 

This was met with silence. The wind gusted several more times, no weaker than the first, before  _ Dratâb  _ replied.

 

“ _You owe the people of the north no loyalty, Eric Richard Bittle the Third,”_ _Dratâb_ said. “ _Child of the southern lands, born under the yolk of ardent service. Those whom you protect live on dying lands, the earth gone to dust and decay. Leave now, let me reclaim my kingdom in peace, or your corpse will lay at its foundation like the rest.”_

 

Eric was stopped from replying, though in truth all sense of language seemed to leave him at this moment, by the arrival of voices to the hall. He turn, his gaze half on the decaying god, and half on the main stair, down which several figures ran. He could have cried at the sight of Jack, his mother in tow, leading down a visibly tarnished group. Among them, Dex, whose red hair was stark against a chest covered entirely in the brackishness of  _ ossa _ blood. 

 

“Eric!” Jack cried, nearly flying down the dozen steps which would bring them to the same level. Eric wanted to run to him, pull himself through the chest plate of a man he now realized he loved with a shocking strength. But  _ Dratâb  _ would not afford them the time, nor humor the sentiment.

 

Dawning knowledge struck Eric like a physical blow. He understood, then what the writing of Ransom’s had alluded to, what he had stupidly failed to see before. Seeing Jack, and the others alive, showed to Eric what he could lose, and what  _ Dratâb  _ no doubt ever had. He knew, with some of the Candorines left still alive, that enough would survive him and what he needed to do. 

 

He turned his back on Jack without a word.  _ Dratâb _ stood, a grey figure against the gnawing cavern of the outside world at night. It was simple, to step toward the god and release everything inside him but the image he held of the matron embracing her own demise. 

 

_ Dratâb,  _ face imperceptible under the veil, did not react until perhaps it was too late. Eric stepped into the god’s space, and ignoring the cries of terror what could have echoed from his very bones, wrapped his arms around the shadow. 

 

Never before had Eric felt so cold in his entire life. Pure iced slid beneath his skin, like the knife that removes the rind, peeling it pack to the pulp beneath. But in turn Eric had never felt his fire so close to the surface, even when it had burned, never had he felt as though he could turn back his own body and expose his very core. He gripped  _ Dratâb _ tight, willing him to feel the warmth of his embrace, to feel the way that his blood beat in his veins, the way life itself breathed with every turn of Eric’s rabbit heart in his chest. 

 

 _Dratâb_ cried out, his words lost to the howling of the wind. 

 

There was no light, or the absence of it. All Eric could sense was a weight growing in his arms, in the small of his back, and down his legs. He gripped tighter, willed his flame to burn ever the more bright, and smiled. His friends were safe, Jack was safe. He felt at last his mind fold open, the way a flower petal might bend back from the center, revealing the color within. 

 

After a countless time, Eric fell senseless to the ground, and everything returned to darkness. 


	25. I Write To Give Word

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Perhaps some questions are better left unanswered.

 

 _I write to give word the war is over_  
_Send my cinders home to mother_  
_They gave me a medal for my valor_  
_Leaden trumpets spit the soot of power_

 

⨁

 

There was a milky quality to the air, blurring the edges of things, the leaves of trees spread out and became one freckled mass. Perhaps that was not quite right, to make a comparison as such. Either way, he could not dwell long on the thought. It was difficult for any pondering to stay with him, they came quickly, and departed just so, leaving little to be remembered by. Around him there was nothing but the absence of sound and the way that light passes slantwise through water, distorting the image so that one portion set aside the other, out of place by comparison.

 

Eric was ten years old again, running through the arbor that for his entire life had covered the land to the south of his home. The sun needed not work hard to get to Eric, the way the peach trees sat squat and close to the ground unlike the other, taller and sparser ones. The air carried a fragrance, which even at this age, Eric knew was special. In truth, he had known many things despite his young age. Maturity was pushed upon the young at the very same moment that grief, or expectation, was. Inferiority, otherness, the significance of speech and the proper way to hold oneself to ensure that any inherent queerness was kept carefully out of view, all made young Eric into a charming, buoyant, and ultimately false boy. Smiles worn as dinner clothes, for show and the statement of the family’s normalcy and comfort. It wasn’t the real Eric, the one which ached, and had grown to guard himself. Here, however, in the groves and along the walkways between his family’s trees, Eric could be himself even for a moment.

 

But the path he took now was unlike any from his childhood. It wound up hill, defying the nature of the landscape which Eric had memorized long before this moment. The slope of the earth was all wrong, leaning too sharply and in the incorrect direction. He knew this and yet he continued, in the way children are want to do, with an energy for the unknown and the discovery of it. The sun shifted overhead, unseen by him, and the clouds began to bundle themselves. His mama had always called them pillowed puffs, when the clouds gathered together in herds but the threat of rain was far off. Eric used to dream that, when he could no longer live with his own wrongness or shame, he might fly up and dwell in the sky.

 

Air shifted as Eric went, taking on a breeze that lifted leaves and tossed his hair. The scent of peaches, hot from the sun, was carried away. The path wound further, moving upwards to where trees grew in worrying directions. Some, as though old women, stooped nearly parallel with the earth. Others clawed at the sky, trying it seemed to rip themselves from their soil beds and ascend to other dwellings nearer the sun. Each step deeper into the shifting woods changed them, angles and degrees falling away, the sun turning about an axis which seemed to no longer be centered.

 

Eric too changed, his feet grew in length, the muscles of his legs shifted and his joints popped as, from his young body, a man stepped out. He felt the age of himself, suddenly, in the way wet drapings weigh upon one unprepared for them. He knew, then, that he must be dreaming, if only to explain how the sky had gone dark, yet no stars shown, (yet he could see them, and yet he did not stop in his progression onward.) Eric, a man in every way like that his father wished him to be, stepped into the woods unafraid.  

 

At length walking up a path all but reclaimed by the undergrowth, Eric came upon a clearing. The trees, uniform for the first time in this slanted wood, curved back from the center as though to avoid a foulness of scent. Eric’s feet continued further in, moving past grass grown evergreen under the darkened sky. At the center stood a tree of the likes which Eric had never seen. From its branches were pine needles and oak leaves, stone fruits of speckled orange and red hung heavy from too-thin limbs. It was a commixture of sorts, as though a child’s unknowing drawing had been used by some divine form for inspiration.

 

Near the base of the trunk, where the grass all but thinned to a coarse, dry and unfirtle-seeming dirt, sat a long figure. Eric stepped toward them, unsure if they slept, or were dead, or like Eric were in the limbo between the knowledge of one’s own dreams and waking.

 

Closer, it seemed, only made the figure shrink from view. They grew thin under their veil, arms wrapped about knees knobbed like aged branches. Their head was wet, and the fabric draped there clung to the face, revealing a brow, and the emptiness where a nose’s slope might have been. It was not until the figure spoke that Eric recognized who it must be.

 

“ _Ember in the hearth”_ the figure said, its breath sucked through wet linen so that it entered the cavity of the mouth and exited, lifting into a bubble. “ _Come to see that which you have conquered?”_

 

 _Dratâb_ , Eric saw, was hardly more than the shadow of an object cast at the lowest of light. Each word seemed to require the entire collection of the god’s thoughts, and the expenditure of all energy. Perhaps it was the safety of this dream, or in relation to what Eric now saw before him, that the fear which had once come forth like a tide was gone. Pity was all that was left, and a sadness which made little sense. A god of decay, laid to waste as he might have have done to Eric, and Jack, and every soul in the north.

 

Eric found that he could not so much as open his mouth to speak. Or if he did, he had no sense of it, his own words falling dead upon the air. _Dratâb_ turned covered, socketed eyes upon him, not in response to word but to Eric’s continued presence beside him beneath the tree.

 

 _“Take heart in this, for I can see now with vision unclouded”_ the deposed god said with ravaged breath, “ _never again will we meet in this world or the other… my return will be assured… after even the longest lived of your descendants are dead and decayed to rust…”_

 

Eric took what _Dratâb_ said not as the threat it might have been intended as, but a promise of sorts. Never again need he worry about this divinity coming down upon the hearts or minds of those whom he loved. It brought Eric to a pause, standing beneath the cobbled tree. Would it even matter, for his wellness of mind to know this? It made little difference, here in this world of shifting light and form, what happened to Jack and the others. They were as far from him now as the sun was from the tides of the south.

 

When he turned around to gather his bearings, _Dratâb_ was gone, left behind only the vague memory of dampness upon the earth, which even in the changing light lasted hardly longer than a moment.

 

Eric was left alone, then. Hearing nothing and seeing no sign otherwise, he turned the way he had come. His sight grew slighter, and for the first few steps from beyond the clearing Eric thought the trees in their liquidness had begun to grow taller. It was with a start that he found it was _he_ who seemed to be growing in reverse. His aged limbs withdrew into his body, his feet once again small and childlike, bare against the earth. By the time Eric once again was between peach trees, in sight of home, he had no memory of any deviation from the body of ten which he wore once again. As the sun peaked, a hand’s span above the horizon, Eric wandered back toward the shadow cast by the buildings of his home. If he fell asleep then, it was because of the infirmities of dreams, and the tendency for them to care little about sense or location.

 

⨁

 

Eric woke with a start, the kind that levered him upright in bed, breathless. The entirety of his body cried out, muscles gone tense from lack of motion. He fell back to the sheets, unable to do much for several minutes but sit in the echoing of his pain. It was clear, then, that Eric no longer dreamed. Even in the worst of his sleeping visions, never had there been pain like this.

 

His attention fell to his arms, laid out in front of him atop a thick duvet. They were exposed to the slightly chill air, and though it may have been a trick of the light, they seemed mottled with reds and yellows that sat deep in the skin. The colors shifted as he did, and the pain brought forth at the motion was enough to put him back to rest.

 

Moving as little as possible, he took in the room around him. Light shone in through a window to the right, the drapes pulled back to reveal a late afternoon sun falling amid pine trees. The sky was clear, a blue so like Jack’s eyes it was uncanny to see.

 

The thought of Jack brought sudden and unexpected grief to him. He let out an unvoiced sob, feeling the tears as they pooled quickly and washed down his cheeks. The room was empty of anyone else, though Eric took slight comfort in the sight of a cushioned chair, pulled so close to his bedside that it looked as though there would be no room for the inhabitant’s legs once occupied. Perhaps there was where Jack would sit when he came to visit, gazing upon Eric who must have, until now, been unconscious for some time.

 

He hadn’t the strength to rise from bed, nor to call out to whoever might be nearby (and alive) to hear him. Eric allowed himself to cry, feeling the gravity of it. It wasn’t sorrow alone, he realized, but an overwhelming relief. When he had taken the dead god in his embrace, he’d been fully prepared for his short life to come to an end. A simple price, one he would pay again, to protect these northerners and the land. And Jack, Eric would do it for Jack too.

 

Part of him, the part not devoted to crying, wondered how mad Jack must be with him. They hadn’t spent much time as lovers (and no time doing anything Eric would consider _loving_ ), yet Jack gave the impression he did not take any injury of Eric’s lightly.

 

And Eric had gone and embraced a god of death and decay to quite literal—well—death. Not really a choice Jack would likely approve of. But it was done, it was a choice that Eric made and he, incredibly, would live with.

 

⨁

 

Time passed quickly. Soon, Eric having slipped away into a light doze, he was woke by the sound of the pine door swinging open on old hinges. A person walked in with an ease of familiarity to their motions. They hadn’t yet noticed Eric’s waking, as they stepped on light feet about the small space, taking a load of wood from the wire frame to feed the dwindled fire, and then to light a candle or two on either side of the bed. It was Lady Alicia, Eric realized, when she crossed finally to the bedside and began to tuck at the edges of the duvet, ensuring Eric’s comfort.

 

She nearly fell over when she saw Eric looking back at her. Her shock was shortly lived, followed immediately by a cry of relief that astounded Eric in its intensity and genuineness.

“Thank the gods, Eric you’re wake!” She said, leaning into his space to press a light kiss to his forehead. Eric felt a drop of moisture hit his cheek, and when Alicia pulled back he could see more there, tears wet against her own.

 

He opened his mouth to reply and found his voice to crack when mustered. He tried again, with little result but to moan in exasperation when nothing near to words came out.

 

“You hush,” Alicia said, patting the bed lightly. “I’ll fetch something for you to drink. It’s been a while since that voice of yours has found any use.”

 

In her absence Eric was left to ponder how long exactly he had been asleep. Or even what the cause was of his slumber. Had _Dratâb_ truly died? What had killing a god done to him? The difficulty was not in believing the passing of a god, but in parsing the difference between his dreams and the reality he now embodied. It very well could have been made up, a fracture of delusion from a taxed mind.

 

When Alicia returned with a tray in hand, Eric was surprised to hear footsteps echoing out behind her. They stopped, however, at the entrance to the room just out of view. The lady Zimmermann didn’t notice, taking to Eric a small vessel. He was surprised when inside he found ice chips, gathered perhaps from crushed icicles outside. Alicia offered one, and when Eric took it in mouth the chill and subtleness of the released water awakened in Eric a thirst he had somehow missed.

 

He hummed as much he could in thanks, and though still half risen from his pillows, gave her his best smile. She returned it, and upon seeing him struggle to rise, moved to prop Eric better on the thick down pillows that surrounded him. It was then that Alicia realized her prior companion had remained outside. She pivoted to the door, and seeing them there scoffed loudly.

 

“Well come in, it's not every day your love wakes up from a coma.” She turned to Eric with a rueful smile and stepped back from the bedside so he could better see the doorway.

 

If he’d had a voice before, it would have left once the figure stepped in. It was Jack, and though Eric should not have been surprised at seeing him, he was nearly moved to tears. Jack had changed very little in the time while Eric slept. If anything, it was the sadness in his eyes that had returned. The look on his face was the same that he had worn prior to the discovery of their companionship. Seeing it there again, beneath the depression of the man’s already droopy eyes, brought a new ache to Eric’s chest.

 

“Hello, Eric” Jack said cautiously. It seemed shyness too had returned in Eric’s absence. What he did not expect was for Jack to begin crying, softly so as to suggest he fought hard to suppress it.

 

“I’ll leave you be. Give him more ice if he needs,” Alicia said, placing a quick kiss to Jack’s cheek and motioning toward the tray upon the bedside table. “Take care of him, he’s not yet regained his voice.”

 

Then the two were alone. Eric was intimately aware of how he must have looked, his skin ugly and mottled like a rotten peach. Jack cried openly, and likely would have stayed away had Eric not motioned, as lightly as he could, to the unoccupied chair. Jack took it in time, and carefully pulled Eric’s left hand into his larger, warmer palms.

 

“I cannot say how relieve I am” Jack said at length, and Eric struggled not to cry anew. Too many people had cried already on his account today alone, he’d have none of it. With an effort he sat forward to reply, but lacking the ability to, motioned to Jack. He hoped the other could understand, _me too_.

 

Even crying, Jack was gorgeous. His face cut sharply, covered now with short, coarse hair that only accented the slope of his cheeks and the depth of his vision. Eric reached out and ran his hand, marred as it was, along the side of Jack’s face, cupping below his ear. Jack looked at him as though Eric was something precious. He was trapped under that gaze, as he’d been so often before, but now with new intent.

 

“I tried not to doubt you,” Jack said, turning into Eric’s weak embrace. “But time passed, and I began to fear that you would not wake.”

 

Eric’s stomach fell. _How long?_ Eric mouthed until Jack understood and continued.

 

“Near a month? I tried not to count the days but Maman did. I can’t tell who was more worried, her or I,” Jack said this with a bit of a laugh, though it was clear he was far too grave to truly feel mirthful at it. “What you did, Eric, I could never have asked that of you. Nor can we repay that sacrifice. I thought you had given your life, and to a bunch or northerners you barely knew.”

 

Eric huffed and swatted at Jack’s arm. Though he had not meant to, Jack discredited Eric for the familiarity he felt amid the other Candorines, and his respect for the people of Samwell. It also made his feelings for Jack seem insignificant. Maybe they had been, Eric realized now. They had never actually sat down and spoken, not about how much Eric felt for Jack (and hopefully, Jack felt for Eric.) There simply had not been enough time, between trying not to die, and nearly dying. And then he had lost even more, nearly a month spent asleep? He could hardly imagine it.

 

This was all noncommunicable to Jack through signs and mouthing alone, and so Eric had to sit on it, wait for the time when his voice returned. It was alright, considering in the absence of words he could kiss Jack. He did, though Jack seemed reluctant to disturb Eric’s rest. His protests were sparse, yielding when Eric leaned forward as best he could and kissed Jack sweetly on the cheek.

 

The coarseness of his beard tickled Eric’s lips, and shot tendrils of mixed desire and relief down to the pit of Eric’s being. Jack was here, alive, and so was Eric. He was going to kiss the starlight out of this man is he had the chance. Jack, a smile slowly spreading across his face so prone to sadness, kissed like he was trying to make up for every day Eric had been asleep.

 

⨁

 

In the following days Eric mostly slept, or ate meals while Jack sat and read to him from tomes. His appetite had not yet returned to full strength. Sometimes he ate simply for the formality of it, or to ease the crease of Jack’s brow when he simply picked at his food.

 

He did not see Alicia again for nearly a week. By then, Eric had recovered his voice enough to speak in small goes. She came in the mid morning, just after the remains of Eric’s meal had been taken away by a young woman. The servant had been polite with Eric, but he could tell by the way her gaze had wavered about the room that she held more than a little curiosity. No wonder, if what meager information Jack said was true. Eric had killed a god in front of nearly all who were in the keep to see it. He could not begin to imagine what they must have been like.

 

It was a relief then when Alicia came, for Eric knew she could maintain her composure far better than any other. What he did not anticipate was for the lady Zimmermann to enter his chamber with his own family’s cookbook in hand, held carefully as though in a sign of reverence. She said nothing in way of it, greeting Eric as she might have any other day, such that Eric might have been simply visiting her for afternoon tea, and not in a sick bed covered in still-healing bruises.

 

After brief conversation she came upon what she clasped in her hands.

 

“I’d like to start, first, by thanking you.”

 

Eric nodded in reply, “you were more than welcome to see the book,” Eric said and found himself to mean it, truly. He trusted the Zimmermanns, all of them. They had been incredibly kind, and understanding in a way his own family had not.

“Not that, though I was highly honored to be given the pleasure,” Alicia replied before continuing. “No, I wanted to thank you for what you did for my people. I know Jack said as much, but it bears repeating, you have done our people and indescribable service. We faced annihilation, and then you came and did… that.”

 

There was a sense of wonder in her words, as though, over a month after the event, she still could not believe what she had seen with her own eyes. Eric, for his part, had no idea what had happened following his actions. Jack had promised to tell him more thoroughly, wanting for Eric to stand where it had happened when he did.

 

“As I told Jack,” he began, “I did what anyone would have done.”

 

“Maybe so, but it was not an action to take lightly.” She paused and considered Eric before continuing.  “On another subject as you have mentioned, I have your family’s heirloom book for you.”

 

She handed it over to Eric. He had forgotten how the weight of it could settle in his hands so thoroughly, and the smell too. Leather, and the lingering traces of cinnamon, and stronger notes of spilled citrus.

 

“I should say, that while I did not mean for it, I may have discovered something in the back of the book.”

 

Her words spurred Eric to turn to the rear cover, revealing the thickly packed end pages he had begun to pry open some months ago. It was indescribably odd, thinking out of time. He was suddenly between where he had last been when his finger pulled up the paper, and where he sat now. In the between time, the paper had been carefully clipped into place by a small metal facet, likely Alicia’s doing.

 

“I didn’t read it,” she offered. “But I remembered you were about to, before I rudely interrupted.”

 

Eric laughed, surprised that her memory could hold onto that so well, when it had slipped his own mind until now.

 

“Yes, I had forgotten about this, in all honesty.”

 

She laughed, in a way that no one else in Eric’s life seemed to be able to, with a fullness void of self critique or doubt.

 

“Fighting an army of _Ossa_ tends to do that.”

 

They shared a few more civilities before Alicia excused herself, leaving Eric alone with the book. Now, knowing he could look at what secrets it contained at his leisure, Eric was unsure. A lot had happened since he last tried to look, and though he had not taken the time for deep self-reflection, it seemed that he was a different person than he had once been. Perhaps more aware of life, in a way that he hadn’t been before. Family secrets didn’t carry as much weight. Or he thought so, until he finally turned his attention to the exposed parchment. There, nestled between the binding of the book and the end page, was a small bunny rabbit, scrawled as his mother had been doing for nearly a decade of Eric’s life.

 

The paper yielded under his fingers easily, glue pulling away to reveal a stack of papers, some folded more than once to fit into the space. Atop the stack was a letter, from Eric’s mother, and dated at the top to what must have been the time of her departure from the keep many months ago.

 

_To my Eric,_

 

_I am writing to you now in hopes that you will find this and accept it as an apology that should have been giving in person. Not for sending you to the north, I must be clear, but for a much older and deeper trespass your father and I made against you._

 

_Enclosed you will find records of your birth, and the circumstances prior to it. I hope you have the sense yourself to know this, but I must ease my mind nonetheless and tell you, that these papers can never be seen by anyone else._

 

_Seeing you again, I have to say that you are more handsome than I could ever have hoped. Despite your father and I, you have become an incredible young man._

 

_In time I will see you again._

 

_With love_

 

_Your Mother_

 

Eric was unsure if he should cry or fling the letter from his grip. Perhaps both, or neither. He was confused, and the feeling lasted as he turned the letter aside and came upon the first of the many enclosed papers.

 

It looked, at first glance, to be a recipe like any other. It was not until Eric began to read the instructions, written in faded and nearly indecipherable script, that he began to reach a different understanding. The script lauded itself as an elixir, one to be taken prior to birth to instill a wellness in the mother and a strength in the unborn child. It contained lemon and cinnamon and countless other herbs which Eric hardly raised a thought at, but also the shavings of trees and elements that were impossible for him to identify. The worst of what he recognized, what made his blood crawl, was ash of a _heartwood_ tree. Never had Eric heard of the tree before joining the Candorines in the north, as not once had the name been spoken by any family or person about his home. Yet here was an elixir containing elements of such a tree, which had been nearly deadly to his friends, and according to Jack, nearly extinct.

 

Eric continued, spurred now by morbid curiosity more than anything else. The next paper was a correspondence between his mother and grandmother, addressed the year prior to Eric’s birth. The contents were straightforward, and lacked the nicesties which he knew were shared between grandmother and mother. Suzanne was asking for help, advice on where to go in search of ingredients which Eric knew were for the elixir.

 

What followed were letters in response, continued discussion between the two, as though Suzanne and his grandmother had no qualms over what such an elixir might do to a yet unborn child.

 

The next was a scrap, by sight torn from the inside of a larger binding of a journal. The same, younger variation of his mother’s script scrawled along the page hurriedly, the words smudged at points where the ink had not been given enough time to dry.

 

_I sought out the woman today and found at her dwelling her sister instead. Both of them, it seems, know of the necessary inclusions. I trust them, gods know why, but I trust them. They seemed kind. Something must be said for women who look out for other women. It can be an unkind world, far more unkind when one attempts what I mean to. I pray, to those whomever look out for foolish women, that this gambit works. I am sacrificing more than I know, for the sake of family and nation. For the sake of my descendants._

 

He could not dwell on one page long, as there was always another to follow it. What came next brought Eric’s blood to a chill.

 

_Lady Suzanne,_

 

_I write to you today in hopes that you fair well in your expectancy. I was much overjoyed to hear that you were with child, and so soon after your marriage. Much a blessing, that another life be born of the Bittle line. I always thought we Bittles came from finer soil than other crops. I hope that my brother is doting, as all husbands ought to be when a new child is due. But I shouldn’t worry, Richard has always taken care of you before._

 

_I had hoped that we might converse sooner, but I was busy with my own children, and with Raleigh as he has been busy with court. The lordships here are fickle things, as you surely know, and my husband’s brother grows more irksome with each passing month. Nevertheless, I had wanted to inquire after the methods of your… preconception. Richard had mentioned that you were trying the elixir. How fair you? I wish well health to you and the child, and hope that the results shine bounteously upon our family and nation. One day more of our children might be born under such a fortune._

 

_May the Phelps and Bittles live long and in unending light (as the courtiers say)._

 

_Love and prosperity,_

 

_Judith Phelps_

 

So Eric been a trial run? An experiment to see what might happen when the elixir was tried on new flesh. And for his aunt Judy to have known… Even though she was Queen of the South, she had always been the nicest toward Eric. Even during the days when it seemed his curse (as he had known it then) would overpower him, she had always spoke to him not as a burden but as a being worthy of love. Often in the dark hours of the early morning, Eric had wished he’d the better fortune to be born to the Phelps, not to be prince of the realm, but to be loved as he was by Judy.

 

But perhaps young Eric had misjudged his father’s sister. Perhaps she had seen him not as a nephew which she adored, but as the product of an empiricism, one which she could see unfurl before her quite clearly. It made dread and grief well like living things in his gut, where once Eric’s fire might have risen up in anger.

 

He debated, strongly, turning the papers over to the hearth and erasing the deeds of his family. There was a foolishness in thinking doing so could remove from Eric the repercussions of their actions. And still a part yearned to know more, to see the details of his birth, to know what had occurred to bring them to this point.

 

He continued. Some gap in time seemed to exist in the papers. The next was not dated until over a year later, another entry from a journal, the edge torn rough and aged by time.

 

 _Eric grows with each passing day, becoming more and more a being and less a shadow of one. It is strange, not knowing if  he is like this because that is what babies are and have always been like, or because of the interference which I have made in the nature of things. Oh_ Ahtahm _forgive the trespasses I have made against you in my unnatural birth._

 

And then, another entry, more than two years after.

 

 _Richard reminds me daily of the weakness of our son, and mine own womb. I cannot decide if he is more frustrated with himself or me, at the failure of our conception of another. It is punishment, maybe, for what we did to Eric. Ironic, then, that he is docile as a lamb, showing none of the strength which we had expected, none of the_ heat.

 

_Perhaps he took all yearning for life from me when he left. Even if he is not what was to be expected, he is an incredibly lovely boy. His eyes shine with a joy that I had not known existed._

 

Eric cried. He cried for what was lost to him now. He would never again be able to look upon his family and not know what had been done, and what they must have expected from him. Tears were shed, too, for young Eric, who had known none of this, and thought by nature of his queerness he had been cursed with fire. They had gotten it in the end, hadn’t they? They wished for a powerful son, a child with heat? Maybe more so than they had expected. It made sense, Eric thought bitterly, the look of shock on his father’s face that day, when brought to terrified anger Eric had set alight his hand and struck his father. He had never been beat for the act, nor sent to the fields to labor as had been threatened to his cousins who acted wild from time to time. Perhaps the reason for this was simple. He had given his parents exactly what they had wanted, and more.

 

⨁

 

Eric could stomach no more, and so sat in silence for the remainder of the day, letting the new reality of his existence crash upon him like the sand might a wave. The sunlight shifted about the small space, and time was only marked when lunch was delivered. As expected, dinner later in the evening was accompanied by Jack, who entered the room flush from the cold where he had no doubt just come.

 

He stopped short at the door, seeing the stupor in which Eric sat. The servant woman said nothing, placing the tray of food and, seeing that Eric needed nothing else, leaving.

 

“Something’s happened?

 

“I don’t want to speak about it,” Eric said. He was leaden, from head to sole. Stone cast. Not even the smell of the food roused in him any feeling but the emptiness which ate away at his mind. He had discovered too much, and there was no way to go back to a place before that knowledge was known.

 

“I have something for you,” Jack offered in the silence that Eric left. He sat slowly, and unsure of himself placed a letter which Eric had not noticed in his hand on the tray atop his lap. Even from a distance Eric could see the seal stamped into the red wax. Trees, the arbors of the Bittle sigil.

 

“Throw it into the fire, Jack.”

 

“What? Bitty its from your family…”

 

“I said throw it into the fire, Jack!” Eric cried turning to him fully for the first time.

 

Jack levied him the gaze that always managed to make Eric aware of his very composition. It was the kind that must have been able to peel back the sheer layer of a thing, see inside, inquire about its making. Jack might not have been the best conversationalist, in fact often called a drone by Shitty and the others, a bee incapable of anything else but fighting. But Eric knew the intellect that sat behind his icy eyes. In the moments he’d witnessed it first hand, he’d been amazed at what Jack could perceive.

 

“I know you said you did not wish to speak of it, but clearly there is something here that needs to be voiced.”

 

It was not a command, nor really a question. Jack worked best in statements that left the choice for the other party to decide. Eric returned his gaze, grief and anger resolute within. He lasted nearly two minutes, before relenting and defying his mother in one action.

 

The papers seemed even more bounteous when placed in Jack’s massive hands. He took them in with sweeping eyes, a question on his brow unvoiced as he read the first letter, and then the recipe, following, as Eric had, the progression of Eric’s creation.

 

He lasted longer than Eric had, stopping someplace beyond Suzanne’s third journaling.

 

“Is this what I think it is?”

 

“What do you think it is, Jack?”

 

Jack turned the words over in his mouth before answering.

 

“They… made you intentionally?”

 

Eric nodded, knowing that he would cry again if he so much as looked at the papers.

 

“Yes they did, and they punished me for it and finally, when it seemed that I would not quell it, sent me here in hopes that the _legendary_ Candorine knights, hunters of the slanted, would kill me.”

 

Jack was shocked into silence by this. His mouth opened once, twice, before the words came.

 

“I never knew why you had truly came. You seemed unsure yourself. I had never guessed, well, I never guessed they had sent you away for _this._ ”

 

Eric laughed. What went unsaid was that, had he not been some embodiment of a walking forest fire, he’d likely been sent away for his predisposition for queerness just the same. Something the north had always been better about, something that he and Jack had never discussed.

 

“Knowing this, Eric, I think you should read that letter.”

 

Ripping out the thorn, Eric took up the travel-dented parchment and broke open the seal. Inside, as he had expected, was the emotionless script of one of his father’s assistants. Not wanting to wait for Jack to read himself, Eric orated the short note.

 

“Lord Eric Richard Bittle the Third, we write you with utmost regard, wishing you of good health and countenance, and ask that you kindly depart for the southern pride post-haste.” Eric turned a look of reproach toward Jack, who simply motioned for him to continue.

 

“His Highness King Raleigh of the southern pride has called to arms the Phelps and Bittle clans against the would-be usurpers to the throne. Please return to us with all do speed, to the best of your health and by the grace of the gods.”

 

Eric skipped the portion where, pretending that another had not writ the letter in its entirety, his father had signed with his wide, confident script. The silence in the room only made the thoughts that rebounded inside his heard all the more visceral. Gathering himself, Eric sat forward and said with confidence to Jack what the other assuredly already knew.

 

“My family has entered a civil war, and I cannot say that I am entirely dismayed.”

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Wow, first I would like to give my deepest apologies for falling off the face of the earth. I wanted to write this final chapter before I left for my study abroad in London, but creative flow and time were not on my side. So again, I am sorry for making you all wait for this. 
> 
> I am excited to say that, like I had thought before, this story might require a series to truly answer every question (that I want to answer) and explore this world as much as I hope you all want to explore it. I struggled with deciding how I wanted this portion to end, as endings have never been something I have done with grace. Nevertheless I have made my choice (and like Bitty) I'm gonna live with it!
> 
> As always, chapter title and epigraph from a song I've been listening to while writing this piece, this time from St. Vincent's "Paris is Burning".
> 
> Much love, and thank you all,
> 
> Larklure.


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